Straight Face

Citation preview

-ic;EL TI~

llodder & Stoughton

Copyright ©

2002

by Nigel I-Iawthorne

First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Hodder and Stoughton A division of Hodder Headline The right of Nigel Ha\vthorne to be identified as the Author of the \X'ork has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act T988. I

3 5 7 9

IO

8 6 4 2

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval systen1, or transmitted, in any fonn or by any means without the prior written pennission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a sin1ilar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. A CIP catalogue record for this title is available frorn the British Library ISRN 0 340 76942 4

Typeset in Saban by Pali1npsest Book Production Limited, Poln1ont, Stirlingshire Printed and bound in Great Britain by Nlackays of Chatha1n pie, Chathain, Kent Hodder and Stoughton A division of Hodder I-l.ead[lnc 3 3 8 Euston Road London N\v I .J BH

For Trevor

Contents

List of Illustrations We Are Not Safe Best Love 2. Spes Bona 3· School 4. Bioscope 5· Now What? 6. Home 7. Hiding Place 8. Whites Only 9· Stratford Beckons IO. Freedom II. Time to Make a Change 12~. More to Life 13. Hello, Humphrey 14. The Queen and Mr King 15. Secret Marriage I.

Epilogue by Trevor Bentham Index

LX

I

7 20 27 45

6r 88 ro8 133

r66 186 203

22.6 247 271 296

325 32 9

List of Illustrations

Page I Nigel's father, Dr Charles Hawthorne Nigel's mother, Rosemary Hawthorne Nigel's grandmother, Mrs Rice Page 2 Nigel with his mother and siblings, Cape Town The family house in Camps Bay View of Clifton, Camps Bay and the Twelve Apostles m the I960S Nigel with his siblings, Camps Bay Page 3 Nigel, aged 28, at Clifton, Cape Town Nigel in Cockpit with Job Stewart, 1949 Nigel in the Landseer portrait that failed to create a star Page 4 The Northampton Repertory Players, 19 54. Nigel appearing m:

The Little Hut As You Like It Dick Whittington Last of the Camellias Page 5 Nigel in Beyond the Fringe, with Ronald Wallace, Siegfried Mynhardt and Kerry Jordan IX

Nigel Hawthorne Nigel with Elspeth Bryce in Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, Johannesburg I957 Nigel as a reluctant Pantomime Dame, Hornchurch Nigel in Try for White with Marjorie Gordon and Jane Fenn, Cape Town 1959

Page 6 Bruce Palmer at Northampton Repertory Theatre, I954 Anthea Steed, I997 Nigel in the homemade beard used to win a part in Young Winston Page 7 As You Like It, with Gorden Kay, USA 1974 Nigel as Prince Albert in Early Morning, with Moira Redmond and Shirley Anne Field, I969 Page 8 Nigel in Joan Littlewood's Oh, What a Lovely War, Germany I964 Joan Littlewood Nigel as Major Flack in Privates of Parade, with Joe Melia, I977

Page 9 The Millionairess, with Penelope Keith, 1978 Nigel with Paul Eddington and Derek Fowlds for Yes Prime Minister Page ro Margaret Thatcher presents Nigel and Paul Eddington with an award, 1983 Nigel as C.S, Lewis in Shadowlands, with Jane Lapotaire x

Straight Pace Page r r Nigel with Trevor Bentham, partner of Nigel with Bruce Palmer, 1988

21~

years, 1992

Page r2 Nigel as Georgie in Mapp (y Lucia, with Geraldine McEwan, 198 5/86

'Georgie' dressed as Sir Francis Drake in Mapp & Lucia Nigel in Demolition Man, with Sylvester Stallone, 1993 Page r3 Nigel as King George III in the 1994 film The Madness of King George Nigel with Sam Goldwyn on the set of The Madness of King George Good luck card designed by Nigel for theatre production of The Madness of King George III, 1991 On location for King George, with Helen Mirren, Amanda Donohue, Anthony Calf and Rupert Graves Page r4 Nigel at lunch following his investiture, with Joan Collins and Thelma Holt, 1999 Nigel as Lord Ogleby in The Clandestine Marriage, with Joan Collins and Timothy Spall, 1999 Page r5 Nigel with his dogs Reunion with Lena, housemaid to the Hawthorne family, 1999

Nigel, aged 70, playing tennis Page r6 Nigel as King Lear for the RSC in 1999/2000. Xl

We Are Not Safe

l came across a peacock butterfly battering its wings against the sitting room window. They're always finding their way into the house and for some reason seem unable to get out again using the same route in reverse. l tried to catch it in my cupped hands but it kept avoiding me. Finally I snared it and, using words of encouragement which I was quite sure it understood, took it to an open window and released it. As it took off to freedom in the direction of the garden, a bird swooped down from nowhere and ate it. ff I've learned anything in life it is that it's never straightforward. Nothing works out quite as it should or as you'd like it to. When it comes to career or relationships, because we're dealing not just with ourselves but with others, we don't expect things to be plain-sailing. We'd be very foolish if we did. But in matters of health we're very much on our own. When the Mighty Finger points down from above and from the tens of thousands of millions selects YOU, it is deeply shocking to us, and we can't avoid feeling just a little bit let down. One of the lucky ones, I can boast of a virtually illness-free life. I had my tonsils and adenoids out along with everybody else when I was eight or nine and, after living on jelly for three days, found it not only soothing but addictive. Then, some forty years ago, I went in for treatment on my piles. The recovery period is something I shall never forget. But otherwise my only hospital experience had been as a visitor. Until, that is, the Mighty Finger determined that, at long last, it was my turn. A year previously Trevor, my partner, and I had been to I

Nigel Hawthorne

the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean for a holiday. It was here that something odd happened to which the later extraordin ary sequence of events surely must have been connected. We'd gone snorkelling. It was one of those perfect days with the sea a bit choppier than we'd have liked for ideal conditions , but the sun and the salt air were making such inroads on the winter cold and persistent cough I'd brought with me from England that they were rapidly becoming a thing of the past. I was feeling healthy and invigorate d and a good deal younger than my seventy years. In an exuberant mood and wearing both mask and flippers, I jumped from the boat; there was a sound of tearing as my bathing costume caught on an unseen nail and, judging by the merriment of those left on the boat, my nakedness was for all to see. Trevor threw me a pair of shorts from the bag, but first I had to remove what was left of the bathing costume. Over the flippers. After a good deal of treading water, some of which I swallowed , and considerab le fielding of banter, I managed to achieve this. The next thing was to get the shorts on - again over the flippers. This wasn't easy. Finally, feeling a bit worn out and in need of some privacy, I swam round to the prow of the boat and tried again. Eventually, there was nothing for it but to remove the flippers first, which I did, placing them neatly in the boat. I then slipped on the shorts with very little difficulty, replaced the flippers and, at long last, to the accompan iment of a rousing cheer from the boat, set off in pursuit of the other snorkellers. The sea was rougher than I'd realised, but I have always been a strong swimmer and was enjoying myself. Ahead, amongst the boulders, I could see the white of the waves breaking on to the tiny beach. I struck out for the shore. It was at that precise moment that I thought I was going to drown. I - who had been brought up by the sea and who, all my life, had looked upon it as a friend rather than as something to fear. The truth was that, probably because of my exertions - I could think of no 2

Straight Face

other reason -~ [ had no air in my lungs, I didn't panic, but allowed the next big wave to take me in and dump me on the beach where, amidst a startled group of onlookers, I heaved and panted as though I was having a heart attack, And, for all I knew, I might have been. That evening, I was taken to the immaculate island clinic where I was examined by a kindly nurse and doctor who put me on oxygen. The doctor then asked if I'd ever suffered from asthma. 'Many years ago,' I replied. 'When I was a student.' 'It never leaves the body,' he told me. When I got back to England, I saw an asthma specialist who gave me all sorts of tests and put me on antibiotics and an inhaler. In time the breathing improved. This year, we chose to go again to the same place in the Virgin Islands. It is a sort of paradise on earth and I needed a complete break after seven months playing King Lear for the Royal Shakespeare Company. The holiday was idyllic and there was no recurrence of the breathing problem. On our return I got myself ready to work on a film starring Johnny Depp called From Hell. It was to be shot in Prague. The story concerned Jack the Ripper, who, in this version, led a double life as Queen Victoria's personal physician Sir William Gull. The part was a blend of the benign with Grand Guignol and I was greatly looking forward to it. It was the first big budget film I'd been involved with for some time. The twin directors, the Hughes brothers, were extremely likeable, had been over to the house, and even up to Stratford to see King Lear, staying until the small hours to have a drink with all the actors at the Dirty Duck. I'd been for costume fittings and had grown some appropriate sideburns. A week before my departure, the asthmatic symptoms returned. I had to stop in the middle of a game of tennis as I had no breath. I went to my doctor who prescribed a similar treatment to the previous year and sent me for an X-ray. I didn't seem to improve a great deal during the following 3

Nigel Hawthorne

days, which was a bit worrying, but nevertheless, the evening before my flight, l began to pack. At just after six o'clock, I telephoned the surgery to see if the results of my X-ray had come through. Yes, they had, and they were normal. Would I like to speak to my doctor? They rang her extension but she couldn't be traced. 'Dr Watson's here. Would you like to speak to her?' Dr Watson's consulting room looks like a nursery. It is crammed with toys and books to amuse some of her younger patients while she is trying to examine them. She allowed me to speak no more than a couple of sentences on the phone before interrupting. 'Why are you sounding so short of breath? Get into the car at once and come down to the surgery.' I did as I was told. 'There's no way you're going to Prague in the morning,' she announced after she'd examined me. 'I'm concerned that you might have a blood clot on your lungs. Flying could kill you. Another doctor might allow you to go, but, if he did, he'd be a fool.' My whole world had begun to turn topsy-turvy. I telephoned Trevor there and then, trying to keep the alarm out of my voice, and asked him to contact the Production Office in Prague and explain the situation. He then collected me and drove me to the hospital. The doctor wouldn't allow me to drive. That evening, I was given all the tests including an ECG and a scan. As the scalpel-sharp Dr Watson had suspected, there was a thrombosis on the arteries leading to each lung. They'd found them in time, and things didn't look all that serious. At least they were treatable. 'Was it the long-haul flights?' I asked the consultant. 'Could easily have been. Sitting in one position for long periods without moving n:stricts the flow of blood. It's a common cause of thrombosis.' I weighed up the future. The Hughes brothers, Trevor told me, had reacted magnificently and had hastily rescheduled the shoot so that I should have six weeks to recover. That was a relief. Full of warmth and concern, they phoned the hospital from 4

Straight Face

Prague and reassured me about my continuing in the film at a later date. The next day, the consultant came to see me. He told me that he'd been looking closer at the scan, trying to determine the cause of the thrombosis. There was an irregularity in my pancreas. It appeared to be a growth. He wanted me to see a specialist. Like all good medical people, he gave me the message loud and clear, straight between the eyes - then left me on my own for the implications to sink in and the imagination to get to work. They found there was indeed a tumour and the urbane surgeon announced that he would have to remove it. It must have been there before I began work on King Lear, growing a bit, hanging around, biding its time. Before any of us could say 'knife', I was being wheeled down to the operating theatre, the anaesthetist was sinking a needle into a vein and, some six and a half hours later, the operation was over. I became dimly aware, as I lay propped against a hillside of pillows, that a large piece of blue sticking plaster which hadn't been there before now crossed my midriff, that there were banks of flowers all round the room, looking uncomfortably like a Mafia funeral, and that I was ravenonsly hnngry. Both the surgeon and the pathologist believed that the 'lethargic' tumour had been removed withont leaving a trace. To be sure, I would have to have some radiotherapy, 'Just to knock on the head anything that might be lurking,' said the surgeon with a reassuring grin. I pulled out of the film there and then. The future was too uncertain. It is three weeks to the day since I had the operation. There is a mighty twelve-inch scar just below my waist which looks as if Jack the Ripper had embarked on personal vengeance at my absence. I'm feeling sore, housebonnd, impatient to be better but, above all, grateful that, unbeknownst to me, a guardian angel was hovering that evening in late June, guiding Dr Watson to make her incredibly perceptive diagnosis, She

5

Nigel Hawthorne

passes it off modestly as a 'wild guess'. But it saved my life. Of that I'm certain. So that's what I mean when I talk about not taking anything for granted, especially as far as health is concerned. We never know what's around the corner. I've started to come to terms with it all now, even though the physical and emotional shock has been considerable. I swim every morning, though not with quite the vigour to which I'm accustomed; I'll work up to that. I walk twice a day - and sleep. Do I sleep! A lot of the rest of the time, in between the injections, blood tests and the intakes of pills, I thank my lucky stars. And I thank Dr Watson. My friends have been concerned and astonished by degrees. The house is bulging with flowers and get-well-soon cards. The rest is up to me. I pick up a novel and put it down again. I listen to some music. I wander around the garden, conscious that pulling up weeds isn't the most sensible thing I can do. Seamus, our wonderful, exuberant dog, leaps around me totally oblivious of my predicament. We cuddle up together when we have our afternoon nap. Food is a bit of a problem. An awful lot of wind, but gradually it's getting better. At least my appetite is back. If anyone else tells me it's two steps forward and one step back I'll blip them. Someone said to me the other day, 'Now you've got all this leisure time, you should really take advantage of it, deadhead the roses, enjoy the summer, doze off in the sun (what sun?) - write a book .. .'

6

I

Best Laue

'You ought to come if you can.' My mother's voice was dipped and un-English after so many years away. She wasn't sounding very agitated. I suppose it was because she didn't want to frighten me. My father had suffered two massive strokes in quick succession and I was being summoned to the death-bed. I barely listened as she chuntered on about the family bits and pieces. I should be seeing them myself soon enough, though some I hardly knew, others I'd never met. 'I'll do my best,' l told her, wondering where on earth I was going to find the air fare. 'Oh good,' she said, as if I'd agreed to go to tea. 'We'll all come out to the airport to meet you so let us know when you'll be arriving. Oh, and don't forget to bring your bathing costume.' The line from Cape Town was as clear as if she'd been phoning from down the road. I replaced the receiver and stared bleakly at the wallpaper in front of me, not wanting to make a move. Getting a flight wasn't easy. It was early summer over there and everything was booked solid. Luckily, the next afternoon I discovered a bucket-shop over a furrier's in Bond Street, of all places, and managed to get a cheap seat on a plane leaving the following day by telling them it was an emergency. That evening, I phoned home with the details, ironed half a dozen shirts, packed a hold-all and went to bed early. The journey wasn't direct. It was 1968 and, apartheid being still very much in evidence, there were several countries over which we weren't allowed to fly. We zig-zagged across Africa, stopping only for interminable unloadings and refuellings. 7

Nigel Hawthorne

The aircraft was bulging with humanity in all its fonns. I was somewhere near the back with not nearly enough leg· room. There seemed to be a high proportion of children on board, and I had the misfortune to be sitting next to the most repugnant. Sleep was out of the question, nor could I settle to my book. As we began the approach to Lourem;:o Marques, our penultimate stop, I could see through the port-hole that we were flying over a shanty town. The tin shacks were crammed together, giving no privacy. They were makeshift and rusted. We were flying low enough to see some of the people going about their daily lives, few taking notice of the gigantic plane skimming over their heads. I saw a child, naked as the day he was born, glance upwards at us, shielding his eyes from the early morning sun while a mongrel defecated in the sand at his feet. The picture haunts me still. It had been six years since I had last been in Africa. I suppose I'd forgotten what the poverty was like. We were to spend the night in an hotel and carry on to Cape Town the following morning. The delay was unfortunate but I could do nothing about it. At the air terminal, I climbed on to the coach with the others, our luggage roped precariously to the roof, and off we set for the town. Our first stop was the railway station, for some of the passengers were making their way by train to destinations in the Transvaal and Natal. Porters clambered over the roof to hurl precious suitcases on to the pavement below whilst the owners dismounted. To my alarm, I suddenly saw my hold-all flash by the window and rushed out to retrieve it. As I was about to re-board the bus, a small, bare-footed boy of about six or seven, arms as thin as toothpicks, wearing a grubby shirt and a pair of ragged shorts which hung to just below his knees, held on by string braces, thrust a copy of the Johannesburg Sunday Times under my nose. It was an old friend. It would be fun sitting in the hotel leafing through the 8

Straight Pace

endless furniture advertisements in search of news. And there was the comic section, the Katzenjammer Kids and Blondie and Dagwood syndicated from the States in garish colour. I bought a copy and, keeping my hold-all beside me on the seat as the bus moved off, looked around me. So this was Louren~o Marques. I'd never had the time nor the money to visit it in the past but, back in the Fifties, friends would holiday there and regale me with stories about how they'd met the young Aga Khan and his friends at a party, the fun they'd all had in fabulous 'LM.' Nothing I could see through the window of the bus quite matched up to their descriptions of the town but then, to be fair, I wasn't in the mood. Even when the windows look out on to papaya trees and exotic climbers, there can be something desolate about an hotel bedroom and this, with its insipid silk-screen prints and pastel curtains, was no exception. I whistled through the Sunday Times after lunch. Mostly local news. Had there been another war in Europe, I doubt you'd have known. The pages were dominated by 'MUST GO' offers of shoe polish and deodorants at slashed prices. I glanced idly at the social section in case I saw a face I recognised. It was then that I noticed the date. The paper was three weeks old. I decided to have a wander round. I'd got no more than a few yards beyond the hotel entrance when, with half-a-dozen more copies draped over his arm, there was the same boy with the string braces. He had the nerve to try to sell me another so I gave him a piece of my mind. He lifted his huge, reproachful eyes like a chastened puppy. No sooner had he disappeared round the corner than I began to feel ashamed. After all, he was only trying to make a living, out there on the streets every day, in all weathers. Broke as I was, l could buy every one of the papers he had left and not notice the difference. I gave chase. The boy was nowhere to be seen. I ran to the crossroads and looked left and right but it was as though he 9

Nigel Hawthorne

had been swallowed up. I became obsessed with the need to find him. All afternoon, I trudged the pavements barely noticing the town about me. I was a man with a mission: guilt, if you like. Rich white man, poor black child. Oh, my new English conscience, how it hurt. I gave myself a distant target, eleven p.m. If I hadn't found him by then I'd get myself something to eat, but not before. I must have walked for miles. The sun began to get low on the horizon. Soon the street lights would be coming on. Conveniently, the deadline arrived as I was passing a cafe. I was reluctant to go in for that would have been to concede defeat but, through a gap in the curtains, I could see there were three or four couples inside and the food looked appetising. I went in. Half way through my meal, the door of the cafe opened and who should come in, still clutching most of the copies of the Sunday Times he'd had earlier, but String Braces. Without allowing him the opportunity of selling me yet another paper, I beckoned him over and, leaving only enough money to pay for my meal, emptied the contents of my pockets into his hands. He must have thought I was mad, and in a way I was. I was trembling and emotional, fully aware that people were looking at me oddly. The South African Airways trip from Lourem;:o Marques to Cape Town was a great improvement on what had been on offer on the charter flight. No whining children and more leg-room, to begin with. The crew had that humourless, slightly vacant look I knew so well, while the passengers appeared bronzed and relaxed, toying with their complimentary cocktails and dipping into the in-flight magazine. Jaunty piano-accordion music was being piped through the cabin, reminding me of evenings in Pretoria with everybody round the braaivleis drinking Castle Beer and speaking in Afrikaans while I felt a total stranger. I felt a stranger again, my British passport tucked into an inside pocket, and my face a little grey IO

Straight Face

from insufficient sleep and yet another disappointing English summer. We were crossing the Karoo, mile after mile of nothing except the occasional kopje incongruously sticking up in the stark desert. It is said that once Africa gets into your blood"" stream you can never get it out. You're hooked for life. When a landscape so barren and unwelcoming can make one ache to be down there amongst it revelling in its majesty and its silence, I know it to be true. 'You look older than your years,' pronounced my mother, bending forward and proffering a cheek for me to kiss. 'Thanks a lot, Mum.' I was disturbed to notice how badly she was limping. In 19 57, an incompetently performed operation on her arthritic knee had left her semi-crippled. Her face was more lined now, the harsh sun doing her skin no favours. The rest of the family was there too. Jan and John, the twins, and Sheila. I think we'd all put on a bit of weight, John a bit thinner on top, Jan exuberant and dizzy, Sheila slow-moving, quieter and more reserved, the many children and grandchildren staring at me as if I had come from outer space. John drove. My mother was in the front seat because she needed room, ducking in backside first, hauling in the offending leg afterwards, the pain showing in her face. 'Dad's just about the same, Nigel,' said John, driving more cautiously now than when he was younger. Then, with an upward inflection he said, 'I think you'll see quite a change in him, you know.' In those few moments I think I liked John better than at any other time since we were children. He seemed to understand what I was feeling. The journey was unnerving. So much was familiar, quite a bit was changed. 'Robots' where there used to be a stop sign, buildings missing, new hotels - and the mountain, oh God, the mountain, how I loved it with a deep, deep passion. How often, in those early, poverty-stricken days when first I went back to England, did I dream of it or lie awake with the thyme-like II

Nigel I-Iawthome

perfume of the fynbos in my nostrils. And there it was in front of me. ln my foolishness, I wanted to stop the car, jump out and throw my arms around it. John at the wheel was proudly ticking off the new improvements, my dear mother murmuring the names of the shops, street names, products on advertising hoardings, numbers of houses, anything that caught her eye. Through Oranjezicht in the gardens and on upwards towards the low-lying saddle separating Table Mountain and Lion's Head, Kloof Nek, the steep road wider than before, the little houses with their tin roofs and verandahs, and, always in our sights, the mountain. I tried ducking down low in my seat to see whether I could catch a glimpse of the tiny cable car inching its way towards the summit, only half-listening to the overlapping fragments from my family, wanting to weep with joy at being home once more. 'Look, Nigel!' from my brother John. There below was the breathtaking sweep of Camps Bay where I had spent my childhood, the sea an unreal blue, the breakers tickling the edge of the white sand, and, to our left, the majestic sprawl of mountain known as the Twelve Apostles dipping their robes into the ice-cold Atlantic. Down past the little cluster of shops, the palm trees lined up along the front like on the Riviera. So huge now. Could it really be possible that I had watched them being planted? One stormy winter, the great breakers burst across the front, half-drowning Mr Isaacs the chemist on the other side of the road and ruining his supplies of Sanatogen and suntan lotions. The following week, they had to replace the trees which had been swept away. Such excitement. Round the sharp corner into Victoria Road, and up past the police station. There it was. Our old house with its shingled roof and the pergola hung with Golden Shower. It hadn't changed. Dad was propped up against a mountain of pillows. Despite the warnings, I was totally unprepared for what confronted me. To begin with, I barely recognised him. His teeth lay at some distance from his mouth in a mug on the bedside table. I2

Straight Face

He was paralysed down one side of his body. The bedroom was Dad's old consulting room, for he had been a GP. Now he was the patient and my mother the nurse. I kissed the top of his head and babbled something about how wonderful it was to be back, and to see the family again, how good he was looking, the weather, the rain I'd left behind me in London, my flat in Notting Hill Gate which he'd visited, anything I could think of. My mother and John stood in the doorway and listened. I held his strong hand in my own. Finally he spoke to me slowly, and out of the corner of his mouth. 'How are you getting on, Nigel?' Significantly he was asking not about me but about the progress I was making. 'Oh, fine, Dad, fine!' I lied. Though I had a small television job to return to so that my stay in Cape Town would be limited, this meant little to him for it was some years before television would be introduced into South Africa. Generally speaking, my career was at a low ebb and, though I' cl kept it from my family, I had been doing domestic cleaning to raise a few bob for the renL 'You're on the verandah,' my mother told me. I was grateful for the release as much as anything. 'See you later, Dad.' I left him with John who always had a special relationship with him. As I closed the door, I could hear John speaking to him gently, sure of his ground. Alone at last while my mother went off to get the tea, I sat on the bed gazing out at the view I knew so well. Above, I could hear my sister Janette and her husband Dennis crashing about with cries of 'Andrea, I'm not going to tell you that again!' When we had all left home, the house had been divided in two, the main staircase blocked off and an independent one erected for access at the back. Jan and Dennis lived with their family where once our bedrooms had been, while my mother slept downstairs in the old dining room and my father in his consulting room. The smell of the sea drifted upwards to where l was sitting. !wanted time to absorb it all, to catch up with what I'd chosen

I3

Nigel Hawthorne

to eliminate from my life, to wallow a bit in the comforts of nostalgia, to escape down to the beach and be as I was when I was a child, watching my father going off for his early morning swim, my mother walking without a limp, the house one and not divided, with the terrible kids racing all over it as we had often clone, Austin, the clog, in hot pursuit, barking his head off. John went back to work, my mother brought the tea, a selection of Pyatt's No. r Assorted biscuits and sat with me. To our left, some half a mile out across the bay, was the rounded rock which looked like a baker's oven, giving the name Bakoven to the area. I'd never ventured close to it, but, as a child, John had investigated it countless times in his boat. To me it was just a landmark. The sun was at its height now, the light blindingly clear, the details sharp. Over the bay, the seagulls circled and settled, and I could see the shiny tips of brown seaweed as the tide withdrew. My mother filled me in about my father's sudden decline. I was astonished that she was nursing him herself and suggested a day and night nurse but she was adamant that she could manage, so I dropped the subject. Lena, our wonderful Cape coloured maid, came in to say hello. She' cl been with the family off and on for nearly forty years and hardly looked a day older than when my mother first took her on at the age of nineteen. I gave her a hug and asked how her mother was. 'Fine, Master Nigel.' And her daughter, Rachel? 'Fine, Master Nigel.' 'She's a good girl, Lena,' announced my mother after she'd gone. 'Always very loyal.' We talked a bit about the family, how wonderfully supportive Janette had been, minding Dad when my mother had to go out. John too. Always happy to come over and see Dad, though he and his family lived some way off on the other side of the mountain. And Sheila and Ernie, her husband, over at weekends and on the phone most evenings.

Straight Face

I couldn't help feeling guilty that I hadn't been around over the crisiso 'Well, at least you're here now,' said my motheL In all the years I'd been away, she'd sent an air letter every week, scarcely ever missing, and never failed to jog my conscience when I forgot or had been too busy or too lazy to replyo It had been seventeen years since my farewell party in this selfsame house before I' cl left for London to pursue a career in the theatreo Like Ulysses tempted by the sirens, I'd had to shut from my mind all thoughts of paradise - yet, now I was back, I could feel only detached as if I didn't belongo The days dragged by with my father making little progress apart from the fact that he'd become incontinento My mother worked round the clock to look after him and the strain was beginning to telL She and I bickeredo It came out of our anxiety, that I knew, but we had always been so close in the past and it was painful to find how far we had drifted a parto One morning, I'd taken myself down to the little beach in front of Charlie Booth's house, not too far away so that I could be within calling distanceo I' cl handed my mother a blue towel and said that, if she needed me, she was to hang it over the wall by the front door and l would come runningo The day was clear, the sound of the sea lapping against the granite rocks was soporific and I found myself drifting into a blissful doze in the warm sunshineo Suddenly something woke me and made me look back at the house. Blue towel! I raced up the path towards the front door where my mother was waitingo 'Dad's had another strokeo' 'I'll phone for an ambulance,' I saido 'Noo' I could hardly believe my earso 'You can't cope any longer, Mum,' I insisted. She took my hando 'He's a doctor, Nigel, and no fooL If he goes to hospital, he'll know he's going to dieo' Dad had been a terrible patient. When his own doctor had prescribed pills - 'TAKE ONE WITH MEALS THREE TIMES A DAY' - Dad would gulp them all down at onceo When I remonstrated with him he told me to mind my own business. Now there was no time

Nigel Hawthorne

for argument. I took the law into my own hands and phoned for an ambulance. They carried him carefully down the precipitous front steps, wrapping a blanket around him so he shouldn't fall out. We started off. I held his hand the whole way to Groote Schuur Hospital as he struggled to get free of his bindings. It was hard for me not to remember him as a younger man with an eye for the girls. If John were to bring a girlfriend home, in a matter of seconds Dad would have managed to get her sitting on his knee. Not many years before, my mother had nearly divorced him, she said, when she found out that he' cl been going out with his receptionist and had bought her a car. He was then in his mid-seventies. There was hope for us all. The orderlies handled the stretcher roughly when we arrived at the hospital. 'Be careful with him. He's a very sick man!' I snapped, then, having no option but to leave him in their hands, went along to Reception to register him. By the time I'd found my way to the ward, it appeared that my father had undergone a miraculous recovery for as I turned the corner, there he was sitting up in bed, chuckling mischievously and holding the hand of an attractive nurse who was perched beside him on the white sheets. At eighty-six, Dad was incorrigible. The days passed. Each evening I went with the family to visit him, though I was never alone with him long enough to say the things I wanted to say. I was half way through a cruel dream which, of necessity, had to be short-lived. My family, my old home, the mountain, the sea - Africa - none of it seemed real. I'd managed to catch up with a few friends, but had been in no mood for frivolous celebration, visited a few favourite haunts, but now, to my consternation, there wasn't much time left. Of one thing I was certain. Never again would I see my father alive. We'd not been close. I think I'd always been a disappointment to him. Choosing to leave University before I'd completed my course in order to become an actor I6

Straight Face

was a bad move, something he never forgave. Through the years, his greetings to me had been squeezed on to the last eighth of the air letter sent by my mother. 'Dad wants to add a word, so I'll shut up.' They were brief, unrevealing words and always ended, 'No more space. Best Love, Dad.' There were three large department stores in Cape Town in those days, Fletcher and Cartwrights, Garlicks and Stuttafords, which had a handsome restaurant with restrained decor, huge floral displays and comfortable chairs. I telephoned my old friend Sonny Cohen and asked whether I could take him to lunch. I should have known better. 'No. I'll take you.' Sonny had never married but had a string of beautiful young girls he liked to escort to concerts, art exhibitions or to the theatre. He and some gorgeous female went to every first night. He ran a mail order business from an office in Diamond House where my father used to have consulting rooms, so he knew him well. Sonny had a mane of flowing white hair which earned him the nickname 'Silver Fox', and a handshake which was both manly and painful. He was one of the kindest, most generous people I've ever met. Sonny listened as I poured out my sad tale. l don't know how I would have coped had it not been for him. Each day, he'd arrive in his car to collect me. We'd go for a drive. My mother resented these constant visits and the fact that I was being snatched away when there was so very little time' left before my return to England. I tried to explain that I was desperate for someone to talk to. It was tactless of me, of course, and she was hurt. Then, all of a sudden, it was time to pack. Matron had my father up early as my flight left midmorning, gave him clean pyjamas and put his teeth in. He was all ready for me when I arrived. He seemed a bit better, I thought, though the effects of the stroke were still very apparent. I sat on the edge of the bed, my eyes on the clock, and we spoke of this and that. The moment arrived. 'Well, 17

Nigel l-lawthorne

Dad, I have to go now,' I heard myself saymg. 'Where are you going?' 'Back to England, Dad.' 'What are you going there for?' he wanted to know. 'I live there.' 'Do you?' He seemed genuinely interested. At that moment he gave a strange moan. l wondered if he might be having another stroke. He began to raise his arms, seeming to be staring right through me. 'Oh God!' I remember thinking. 'He's going to embrace me!' - not something I would ever have expected from my father. I leaned forward obligingly, but suddenly, summoning huge effort, he shoved me face downwards on to the bed. When I picked myself up, I saw what had happened: he had been trying to catch a glimpse of a nurse who had been going through the ward and I'd been in the way. I got up and made my way to the door. I turned to wave, but he wasn't looking. His eyes were on the ankles of that young nurse with the ash-blonde hair as her heels tip-tapped down the long linoleum corridor. On the way to the airport, I told my mother what had happened, saying it was a wonderful memory of my father to take away with me. But she snapped back, 'He wasn't himself. He didn't know what he was doing.' On the plane back, mercifully flying directly to London for some reason I can no longer remember, I wrote a poem. I discovered it last year going through some papers in my desk: HOME To come home after years and find a childhood father crnelly changed nursed day and night a waiting family no longer yonng. To come home after years and find the Cape I ached for in the twilight north r8

Straight Face mountain blue and sea and sky To look and feel a stranger ... a heavy heart. To come home after years and find the morning beaches crammed with wives eyes closed, minds blank, they bask content the coloureds looking on. To come home after years and find much changed yet not enough an arrogance in the bleached white streets. Home, home, home, home, home Just a word.

,

~

2

Spes Bona

One glorious summer afternoon at a tennis party, in the days when they still had such things, the shortish man with the bald head who would one day be my father gazed across the court at the girl with the soft dark eyes swinging her racquet and dashing about in an attempt to look as if she knew what she was doing, and made up his mind that she was for him. He discovered during the tea break that her name was Rosemary Rice, the daughter of a Coventry doctor, that her mother was an artist and that she was seventeen years his junior. Equally inquisitive, Rosemary had found out that her opponent, the red-faced man of forty whose attention seemed to be so little focused on tennis, was, like her father, a general practitioner, Charles Barnard Hawthorne by name. He hailed from Walsgrave on the outskirts of Coventry, one of four children - the others being girls - a public schoolboy educated at Epsom and Clare College, Cambridge, who had served in France during the First World War as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps. His father having died when he was young, he had been brought up by his mother and three doting sisters, Mabel, Olive and Georgie. He grew into a sturdy young man who was used to being spoilt. Many years later, my mother admitted that she hadn't loved him but had been flattered by the intensity of his attentions. She was, she told me, used to having admirers - there'd been a Geoffrey, and a Leslie who smoked a pipe - yet the idea of this mature and stable man as the father of her children appealed to her. She made her choice. On her twenty-third birthday she walked down the 2.0

Straight Face

aisle of Coventry Cathedral on his arm, wearing one of those hopelessly unbecoming dresses of the period - a sort of sack tied in the middle - the veil slung like a tennis net across her dark brown eyes. It wasn't, to be sure, a marriage made in heaven, my father being used to having his own way, and my mother, having lefr school early to tend to her parents, knowing precious little of the big wide world around her. Eager to do the right thing lest she upset my father, she never achieved full independence until after his death many years later. For their honeymoon, they went motoring in the Welsh hills. In thick fog a car travelling in the opposite direction ran into them round a sharp bend. The driver was killed, my mother catapulted unhurt on to a grassy bank, my father losing some of his pride and the tip of a finger. For a good number of years after this, he dressed only with her assistance, while his piano playing was placed in abeyance until such time as he might recover sufficiently to continue. The young couple moved into The Limes, a sturdy Edwardian house on the Binley Road, my father entered a practice not far away at Gosford Green and awaited the birth of his family. Sheila came first, I next and finally the twins, Janette and John. All within four years. My mother was going to have her hands full. I never knew my father's parents for both had died before l was born, but at home their varnished portraits were on the walls above me, catching the light as I descended the staircase. Above me, Dad's mother Sarah, like a Gaiety Girl in her flamboyant hat, substantial bosom and reigned-in waist, to the right, my grandfather - less confrontational, more conservative - sitting formally posed and formally dressed at his desk. There were portraits, too, of their own parents, looking like something out of Cranford ··· she wizened in a frilly bonnet and he stern and forbidding with a starched shirtfront. Great--grandfather had been an itinerant parson 2I

Nigel Hawthorne

who had ventured from the West Country selling God and elixirs to anyone who would have them, and wound up in the M.idlands where the family had settled. I only wish that I could elaborate more on my father's history, but winkling information out of him was impossible. On the slightest suggestion of a probe the Hippocratic Oath barricades went up and anyone but a nincompoop would know that there was absolutely no point in persisting. Were you to bury him up to his chin in sand he would never divulge his secrets. My mother's side of the family was another kettle of fish. Hers was a family of major social conscience. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, one of the first women doctors in the country, was a second cousin, as indeed was Millicent Garrett Fawcett, President of the Women's Suffrage Society. Mother's aunt Amy married Jack Badley and together they founded Bedales co-educational school, an innovative and somewhat shocking concept in its day, which went on to become one of the most progressive teaching establishments in the country. Her mother Elsie, my grandmother, having graduated from the Royal Female School of Art, was taken on by her sister as the art mistress. Charles Rice, who taught mathematics, took a shine to the art mistress and they married. They had two children: a son killed in the Great War and my mother, Rosemary. Their marriage drifted over the years through various changes of circumstance, including Charles becoming a doctor, but sadly without a serious bond of affection Charles and Elsie separated in I93r, three years after I was born. My mother's uncle, Edmund Garrett, was to eclipse all those strange and intriguing relatives. Consumptive, handsome and romantic, he was sent by the Pall Mall Gazette, where he worked as a reporter, to South Africa for his health. He became editor of the Cape Times, taking on all comers including his long-term friend and adversary, Cecil Rhodes. In a climate of jingoism, his was a refreshingly liberal presence, ambitious,

Strnight Face

courageous and hmTiane, Eventually elected to the Cape liament, he nsed his influence wisely until consumption bested him and he returned to England to die, Here at my home in Hertfordshire , in what we call the parlour, stands a highly polished bureau, At first glance it isn't particularly distinguished in any way, There are two pronounced cracks on the lid which don't seem to have worsened through the years and, to my mind at least, add to its charm, and the ornate brass handles, or what's left of them, seem to have been added at a later date and are not quite in keeping with the rest of iL The trim around the base is of a different wood from the top and recently has come adrift from its moorings, I keep meaning to stick it on again, It doesn't appear very English, There's a Dutch look to iL Its previous owners are reputed to have been Cecil John Rhodes and Rudyard Kipling, though as the latter was only a visitor to South Africa it seems unlikely that he would have encumbered himself with such a hefty piece of furniture, It had then passed to Edmund, my grandmother , and eventually to me, It stands there foursquare, somewhere between fond heritage and a rebuke, a testimony to a grander ambition than mine could ever be, The home we had in the Binley Road was pleasant enough and there was a garden at the back where we children could play, but my father had become increasingly concerned about our proximity to the traffic An academic friend of his, Gilbert H.utchinson, had been offered a University post - in Cape Town of all places - and managed to infect my father with some of the enthusiasm he himself felt about emigrating to the sunshine and fresh air of this land of promise. History was beginning to repeat itself. In those days, everybody went on the mail boaL In Great Uncle Edmund's day, the fare had been £56 - now it was a little more - and the journey took two weeks, Dad persnaded Hutchinson to let him tag along. Just to see what it was like, 23

Nigel Hawthorne

My father was captivated by the place. He bought a house and a practice from a Dr Lester and came back to fetch us. It must have been galling for my despairing grandmother having to travel to Liverpool to wave goodbye to her beloved daughter Rosemary, particularly when her new hat blew off and went under a tram. Here we were emigrating to the same part of the world which her brother Edmund had so loved. It was a coincidence to which I don't suppose my father had given a second thought. He didn't have much time for Mrs Rice, as he would insist on calling her. In any case, he was a Hawthorne, his wife was now Mrs Hawthorne and all their children were Hawthornes. The Garretts were from the other side of the family. As it turned out, the separation was not to be a long one, for, a year later, my grandmother was to join us in South Africa. We sailed on the Ceramic in August r932 with everything we possessed down in the hold: the grand piano, wardrobes, corner cupboards, a grandfather clock, a massive walnut sideboard, a dining table with adjustable leaves, my father's family portraits, my mother's collection of Crown Derby and Wedgwood, her crockery and cutlery, even the bedstead on which she and my father slept. On our arrival, in the unaccustomed glare of this brand new world, we paused briefly at the Hotel Cecil (after Cecil Rhodes, who else?) in Newlands while, several miles away in the centre of town, the furniture was being positioned and the portraits hung on the landing above the staircase, easily the best feature of 80, Queen Victoria Street, the house which was to be our home. It was a large and ugly pile, depressingly dark, with a rickety verandah in the colonial style and some steep steps leading up from the pocket handkerchief patches on either side of the path to a front door fitted with stained glass panels to let in some badly-needed light. Wrapped round the front like a mangy boa constrictor was a rampant and thorny bougainvillaea, coated with grime and eager for the sun. It

Straight Pace

never flowered because it never saw it - the house faced the wrong way. At the back, which paradoxically received the full blast of the sun, was a derelict conservatory containing wire hanging baskets with nothing in them and a few parched ferns in terracotta pots. Instead of glazing there were slats of whitewashed wood running from the house to the outside wall, ideal for young children to crawl across when their parents' attention was elsewhere. Across the road were the public gardens. When the Dutch had settled at the Cape in I 6 52, a large vegetable patch had been planted to supply ships travelling to and from the East, the centre of the spice trade. The Cape was nicknamed 'The Tavern of the Seas'. Now the gardens were purely botanical. There were low ponds crammed with indolent goldfish and waterlilies, an equestrian statue to the heroes killed at Delville Wood, a clntch of steamy hot-houses where you could admire the tropical plants, an aviary, a museum and an art gallery with not a Rembrandt nor a Gaugin in sight, while further down was the public library, the cathedral and the House of Assembly where Great Uncle Edmund thirty years previously had spent so many hours in debate. With all these places of interest crammed into so picturesque a setting we could never fear boredom, and the generous spread of the gardens with their wide gravel paths proved an ideal location for Nurse Rodwell to exercise her young charges, the twins in a double pram, Sheila and I on reins to prevent our straying too near the water. We'd arrived in the spring. The oak trees in Government Avenue were coming into leaf, the squirrels romped, the doves cooed and all over the mountain slopes the wild flowers blazed with glory. When the turbulent South-Easter descended on the town to slam doors and rattle roofs, it announced its arrival with a billowiug 'tablecloth' which tumbled spectacularly down the face of Table Mountain. What a view we had from our bedroom window! Sheila was the lucky one. She

Nigel Hawthorne

was old enough to take in all the details. l was only three and a half and could hardly be expected to, while the twins would have been in another room gurgling away in their cots. As the months and years went by I would catch up and grow to appreciate the beauty all around me, discovering a place which would haunt me for the rest of my life. Our family had come to Darkest Africa only to realise that it was, in fact, from Darkest England that we'd come. Here, as we were to learn, the air was clean and invigorating, the sun shone from a clear blue sky rather than playing peek-a-boo behind threatening rain clouds and, sleepy hollow though it was with its colonial affectations, its Victorian trellis-work, the hansom cabs and leisurely pace, the Mother City at the southernmost tip of the African continent seemed a bit like paradise. 'The fairest cape in all the circumference of the earth,' declared explorer Sir Francis Drake. With his experience of travel, he probably knew what he was talking about.

School

You're a wonderful fellah Your legs are so yellah You swim like a swallah And dive like a hake. (Brother Quinlan) I went to three schools in all. The first, St Cyprian's, was way up on the slopes of the mountain in Oranjezicht, with the bay somewhere down there, hidden by the trees and rook St Cyp's was for girls, unless you happened to be enrolled, as I was aged five, in the kindergarten, where a glorious time could be had spattering sheets of cartridge paper with poster paints and emptying the sand·pit all over the highly·polished parquet floor. First thing, Miss Dushek would arrive in form·hugging tunic with black stockings to match to give us drill, with a staccato no·nonsense piano accompaniment. 'Astride, together, astride, together ·· step, hop, hop, hop - step, hop, hop - one, two, three, hop, - one, two, THREE!' Diminutive gymnasts flailed about doing their level best to keep up, not knowing quite what was expected. While it's over sixty-five years since I one, two, three·ed, Miss Dushek's jingles are as familiar to me now as if they had been international standards. The school stood back in substantial grounds dotted with spindly pines, with the added attraction, just outside the main gates, of a neighbour's garden which boasted a loquat tree,

Nigel Hawthorne

the branches of which obligingly hung over the pavement well within the reach of agile Kinder. We'd guzzle the sweet fruit, caressing with our tongues the shiny, rather sensuous stones before spitting them out into the gutter. Deep in our heart of hearts we knew that we were stealing, and there was always the thrill of getting caught. That summer, I was Michael, the youngest of the Darlings in Barrie's Peter Pan - my very first play, and what an adventure that was. Out there on the school lawn and in full view of the audience, we had to assemble Wendy's house from a collection of brightly-coloured stools borrowed from the classroom. I made rather a hash of it first time round and confused the issue, putting reds where there should have been yellows, greens instead of purples, sowing the seed in the minds of canny observers that a practical streak might never be my forte. I doubled as the crocodile, seeing my way with difficulty through my mask due to the rows of jagged teeth. Halves of tennis balls were my eyes, while my dyed green stockings afforded little or no protection against the pine needles, as I crawled by making menacing noises in my throat to instil fear. At a given moment, I had to remember to set off a large kitchen alarm clock concealed about my person which, at each of our two performances, earned a smattering of applause from the assembled parents which was oddly satisfying. My sixth birthday arrived. I was encouraged to tune in to the wireless that afternoon. To my astonishment, I heard my name mentioned on the programme. Me? Was I dreaming? How on earth did they know that it was my birthday? My parents feigned innocence. I was instructed by the radio 'Uncle' to make my way to the airing cupboard where I would find something to 'surprise' me. When I opened the door, l couldn't see it at first, but then I did. Curled up on a pile of towels was a mountainous black cat. Seized by the emotion of the moment, I hugged her to me, which was probably a mistake as the wretched thing gave me ring-worm, and that, I'm very

Straight Face

much afraid, was that. The cat was removed from the premises to an unknown destination. In spite of everything, though, I think it would be true to say that I was on a small cloud of happiness. This was partly due to Miss Wood, my Form One teacher. I don't suppose she ever knew how hopelessly in love with her I was. On St Cyprian's Day every year there was a procession down Government Avenue involving the whole school dressed in white, for a service in St George's Cathedral. Two of the youngest were selected to march behind the head girl, who was carrying aloft a banner bearing the school emblem. We lucky ones clutched ribbons attached by small safety pins to the shoulders of her dress, which was considered a great honour. After all the excitement had died down, Miss Wood took me on one side, said she'd watched me in the procession, and would I like to be her page boy as she was getting married? Try and stop me! Tom as I was between pride and jealousy, I could think of nothing else for weeks. Then I got mumps. Mumps! I was in isolation for the rest of the summer. Just about everything swelled up - under my arms, between my legs - I looked like Fatty Arbuckle. To me it was the end of the world. It certainly was the end as far as the wedding was concerned. One day a letter arrived signed Elizabeth Mitchell-Heggs with a photograph of the newly-weds, not at the ceremony - she was too tactful for that - but suntanned at the net in their tennis gear. There was never a happier looking couple. Some twenty years later, after I'd become an actor and was on tour in what used to be Southern Rhodesia, I was at a reception where, quite by chance, I was once again to hear the name Mitchell-Heggs. I asked to be introduced to the dimly-familiar man nursing a drink. 'Are you by any chance related to Elizabeth who used to be my teacher?' 'She was my wife,' he replied. 'She died on Friday after a long illness. Cancer.' And he moved away.

------------~-'"""'

Nigel Hawthorne

For the Christmas holidays, the hottest time of the year, my parents had rented 'Verdun', a corrugated iron bungalow at Bakoven, which was beyond Camps Bay. A tiny beach supplied my father, even at low tide, with just sufficient water to immerse himself. The sea was icy. Three strokes out, three back, a gargle, some stretching exercises on the beach - touching the toes, or near enough - and ending up with a run between the rocks with Austin at his heels. It was a daily routine before breakfast. Austin wasn't ours. He was a friendly mongrel, most like a border collie. Dad called him a black and white 'Seldom', because you seldom saw another dog like him. We all grew to love him, and it soon became clear that he preferred being with us to going home to his rightful owner. Already the little beach was casting its spell on the whole family. The smell of the sea air, the sound of the waves slapping against the rocks, the ebb and flow of the tides and, straight ahead, the magnificent view with Lion's Head thrusting up into the intense blue sky through the commotion of the surf at its feet, made us all long to be here permanently rather than in the stuffy confines of Queen Victoria Street. St George's was next, the grammar school attached to the cathedral, that grimly forbidding pile at the foot of the avenue. Disappointingly, I was denied a place in the choir for it carried with it a stigma, a small reduction in fees. It would not have been appropriate had word got out that Dr Hawthorne's son was being educated at a cut rate. Mrs Sohr was a dumpy little sadist known as 'Auntie' who had little or no patience with unruly boys. She looked cuddly and wasn't. Not in any way. In later years, cuts were things applied to salary or to scripts when they were over-long, but in those far-off days they were the swish of the cane, ruler or strap. Few things, in my opinion, can be quite so agonising or humiliating as bending over in front of your classmates to have your bottom whacked.

Straight Face

One day, 'Auntie' invited us to take part in a competition to test our ability to draw. -we were to sketch whatever we wanted. 'Anything, Miss?' She flashed a rare smile. 'Any· thing.' Never someone who found it easy to make up his mind, I sneaked a glance at some of the other boys' efforts, mostly mundane things like sailing boats and aeroplanes, before choosing to divide my page very carefully into sections using my ruler, then, in what I hoped to be an original and imaginative way, illustrate in comic-script terms the story of Red Riding Hood. 'Auntie' beat me in front of the class. She was like that. It was obligatory to learn the second language, Afrikaans. We learned it as children, because we had to. We read novels and poetry and wrote essays, but had little occasion to speak it. At St George's Grammar School Percy Piek did his utmost to steer its intricacies in our resistant direction. 'R-r-r-reenboogvlerties!' he'd sing out. 'R-r-r-ainbow little wings!' And, suiting the action to the word, he would cavort around the classroom flapping his arms, looking iu his black academic gown more like a bat than the butterfly he was attempting to emulate. That was one word at least that we'd never forget. As well as being no stranger to flamboyance, Piek had a filthy temper. Also, he could be very unpredictable. With the agility of an athlete, he would spring suddenly and for no apparent reason on to the lid of a desk at the rear of the class, then, hitching his gown about his knees, creep stealthily across the lids of the desks in front of him until, with a cry straight out of the primeval jungle, he'd pounce upon an unsuspecting unfortunate from behind, raining blow after blow upon him at random with demonic ferocity until he could go on no more and subsided with exhaustion. Shortly after! left St George's, I heard that they'd made him headmaster. Camps Bay, in those days, was little more than a seaside village, a modest cluster of houses, three or four shops like Mrs Forbes's haberdashery, Sher's the greengrocers and Larnbert's

3I

Nigel Hawthorne

Tearoom, where you could get scones plastered with quince jam and a dollop of cream, Along the road was the pavilion, a shabby, sun-bleached structure where the concentration of the sun had blistered away stretches of white paint to reveal beneath the naked wood surrounding the glass, The birds would make it worse, their beaks finding their way beneath the congealed paint as they searched for titbits, There was a tearoom at street level where we could buy cold drinks, and down below was a huge concrete swimming pool alive with small fish, for at high tide it was washed by the ice-cold Atlantic, It attracted few bathers for, in addition to the temperature, lurking in its depths were hazards such as slimy, slippery seaweed, razor-sharp shells, and concealed rocks, lethal with barnacles, An added detraction was the seemingly limitless quantity of used French letters which the currents contrived to lure into secret pockets of rocks, a source of endless delight to small children accustomed to balloons at party time, Public-spirited grown-ups who passed by and saw us stretched full-length at the side of the pool trying to net these strange devices would frown disapprovingly, though the reason for their displeasure was never voiced, Perhaps it was too shocking, Their wagging fingers told us we were doing wrong, Far preferable were the heated public swimming baths just across the main road, I've never enjoyed swimming in fresh water as much as salt. Here, the pool was heated sea water, chlorinated, and there was a roof making swimming possible in all weathers, Further up the Victoria Road, beyond the be-flagged police station, was another, and much smaller, bay, Bang in the centre of this idyllic spot was a vacant plot which my father decided to buy, The plans for our new home, carefully monitored by my mother, began to take shape, The two-storeyed building was to be set into the rocky cliffside and would rise above the main road, gazing down, over the tops of the trees, upon the glistening bay, so like a mill-pond in the summer yet so 32

Straight Face

turrmlent in winter. The land proved to be a snake""infested wilderness of wild mimosa and thorny hakea, the workmen having to drill deep into the bedrock to lay the foundations while avoiding the colonies of scorpions and ferocious· looking spiders whose own homes and lairs they were disrupting" In the meantime, we moved into a honse called Mersey Lodge on the windy ridge above our plot. Austin followed us from the beach one memorable day, took one look at the garden and decided to stay. We were all delighted, but his angry owner arrived with the police and we were accused of 'harbouring' her dog. Finally, seeing the odds were against her, she capitulated with what we all thought to be rather bad grace. Austin was now officially ours and the most precious addition to the family imaginable. His loyalty was total. When we arrived off the bus from school, he'd be in his favourite spot under the tree. Then, as we climbed the steps, he'd rise, contort his body into convulsions of squirming delight, wearing on his face what was quite clearly an idiotic grin, and we'd hug him and kiss the top of his head despite the fierce and repeated warnings from our father not to get too close. The bus to school went from Victoria Road, so we had to race down the public steps to catch it. To the left of the steps, we could see our new house beginning to take shape and the retaining walls, built with rock dug out of the land, being pieced together under my mother's supervision as they were to dictate the outline of her garden. The site was out·of·bounds during weekdays, but over the weekends we'd walk the planks like so many pirates and push the wheelbarrows, drinking in the intoxicating smell of cement and new timber before pausing to view our domain. The road passing below was no problem, there being very little traffic in those pre·war days, while the house was perched some fifteen feet above it over a double garage. My mother had a teak pergola built over the flat roof of the garage and, for many years to come, it burst forth in summer with the vibrant orange bells of the

33

Nigel f-lawthorne

Golden Shower creepeL The land on the far side of the road was council property and nobody was allowed to bLrild on it. Beyond was the glory of the sea. As the sun began to set, and the cars below began to straggle home, we'd sit on the half.finished walls watching the myriad changes in the sky conjured up by nature with never a danger of repeating herself. Down to our right, as we looked towards Camps Bay, was a snaking path which led to a pocket-sized beach. I was soon to know every rock, every pool alive with its own private aquarium of klip fish, shyly-backing crayfish and exotic anemones sinuously waving their tendrils in the current like Salome's veils, and around it, like a protective blanket, quantities of sighing brown shiny seaweed which made its own particular symphony as the tides came out and in. At school, one of the prefects who lived nearby was dragooned into keeping an eye on me when I went home, making sure I got on to the right bus and didn't jump off until the thing had come to a complete stop. One afternoon, without any warning, he suddenly rolled off the seat beside me and began thrashing about on the floor. The bus conductor and a burly passenger, showing great presence of mind, hurled themselves on top of him and forced what appeared to be a pencil between his teeth. It was later explained to me that he was an epileptic and that the pencil was to stop him swallowing his tongue. I couldn't help wondering, in my state of frozen horror, how anyone's tongue could be prevented from being swallowed and particularly by a pencil - as one end of it was attached, but the image of this squirming prefect dribbling at the mouth was to haunt my dreams for many a year. While the grammar school had been perfectly acceptable when we were living in town, the jonrneying to and fro obliged my parents to bunt around for somewhere a bit nearer. My brother and sisters were in the same boat, of course, and 34

Straight Face

gradually we were all moved. For me, my parents' choice was the Christian Brothers - a name to strike fear into the stoutest of hearts. Deeply ill at ease, I stood in the quadrangle amongst the other new boys, each of us in vivid blue, green and gold striped blazers as Brother McEvoy, he of the hooded eyes, leapt athletically on to the slatted wooden bench to welcome us. The school, or college as we were expected to call it, was in Green Point, only a mile or two from the centre of Cape Town, and built on the slopes of Signal Hill from which, at noon, a gun was fired each day, scattering the pigeons. Across Table Bay, we looked down on Robben Island, once a leper colony, then a penal settlement where Mandela was later imprisoned. The journey home from the new school, my parents' chief worry, proved to be even more difficult than previously, particularly at rush hour, when the buses would rattle past with the 'FULL' sign up, leaving a disconsolate group of small children in striped blazers with their hands outstretched knowing that they had a long wait ahead of them. Dominating the school was a huge brick clock tower, its hourly chimes provoking murderous thoughts amongst local residents. The property was quite narrow, sandwiched in amongst the single-storeyed houses, and ran from the High Level Road via a series of steep terraces and playing fields to the Main Road abutting Green Point Common where I got my bus. Somewhere down there, among the landscaped gardens and tennis courts, was the rather sinister rambling house where all the Brothers in their black gowns and rosary beads lived in seclusion, and to which we were not invited. We new boys were soon to discover that teaching was by intimidation. Years later, I met one of the Brothers who had taught in a class junior to mine - no longer wearing the sweaty black robes held formally together by a wide sash, but in civvies. 'Oh, we were a terrible lot of frauds,' he giggled in a mock Barry Fitzgerald voice. 'Wearing those robes and back-to-front collars and all that piety. We'd no 35

Nigel Hawthorne

right at alL We weren't ordained, you know.' (Perhaps they weren't even Irish. They certainly weren't very good teachers.) This didn't stop them forswearing the company of women with the solitary exception of Miss MacCormack who wore a built-up boot and provided, at a price, sustaining meals with pie-crusts and mashed sweet potato for those boys who couldn't manage to get home at lunchtime. In their deep pockets the Brothers carried a strap. It was composed of strips of black leather stitched together and soaked in brine. One end was tapered into a grip. It could be used with force on hands or behinds, depending on the mood of the Brother dispensing the punishment, and, being an Irish order, moods could be variable. There was one Brother for each year of my schooling there. All good men and true, with reservations, though not exactly the seven pillars of wisdom. Much has been written about the Christian Brothers' approach to schooling at that time, their recourse to violence as a method of education, and questions have been frequently raised as to whether they paid more attention to results at exam times than to how, why and what they were teaching. Certainly, as far as the pupils were concerned, there was no room for individuals. Each day they followed the same curriculum, regardless of whether or not they showed an aptitude for the subjects, and there was a preponderance of mathematical classes, algebra, trigonometry and the like, which baffled me then as they baffle me now. When I think back on the agonising I went through learning about equations, decimal points, logarithms and what turns litmus paper blue, which from those days to this I've never once had occasion to use, I wonder whether the time might not have been better spent studying languages, art or music, which were not deemed to be an essential part of a young lad's education, but which might have been of some use as I made my way through life. So the misery of maths was drummed into me with the persuasive use of the strap, should

Straight Face my answers prove unacceptable. Oddly enough, my mental

arithmetic isn't at all bad, even today. l can march into Tesco's and tot up the bill without a flicker, and sometimes in advance of the tilL Perhaps the fear of the strap hasn't left me, and I can visnalise one lying within easy reach of the check-out girL The Hail Mary is chanted by Roman Catholics the world over and, as schoolboys, we got to know it very well, though I have seldom had occasion to use it. When the hourly chimes from the school tower began to ring out, there'd be a clatter of desk seats as the whole class rose, the Jews and Protestants remaining respectfully silent while the Catholics began 'Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, Blessed art thou amongst women .. .' in a mechanical drone, which the rest of us suspected contained very little grain of thought. Should a boy be experiencing 'cuts' when the clock struck, the punishment would cease for the duration of the prayer, and as the last strokes of the clock faded and nail-bitten fingers flicked across blazers in the sign of the Cross, the strokes of the strap would be resumed. So began my slow and often painful journey towards puberty. I remember my mother being very upset years later when she read an interview I'd given to the Guardian. I was quoted as saying that I'd had an 'unhappy' childhood. What I'd said, which was very different, was that I was an 'unhappy child'. How could any child, brought up in that paradise on earth, with everything he could ever want, away from the war, the bombs and the rationing, claim that his childhood was unhappy? She was hurt and puzzled. I couldn't tell her then, any more than I could have told her in those early days that the complexities I was encountering sexually were beginning to isolate me because there was no one to whom I could tum. l don't remember making many friends at schooL The shyness which was to plague me later was already tightening its grip. I easily became tongue-tied and was inclined to keep my own counsel rather than risk making a fool of myself. 37

Nigel Hawthorne

Where others boys gained in confidence, I began to diminish. As my legs got longer, my body bonier and my skin spottier, I became increasingly self-conscious, blushing to the roots of my hair when anyone spoke to me, taking to watching the world go by from the sidelines rather than get involved, doing things because they were expected of me rather than because I wanted to do them. A stout man with patent-leather hair came to teach us to sing 'The Owl And The Pussycat', We were to enter a competition at a hall in Greenmarket Square in the centre of Cape Town. We'd hit the big-time. Only one other entry was announced so we were convinced it would be a cinch because of the endless pains exerted by Mr McQuade to have us sing in a style which would put the Vienna Boys to shame. Many compliments to our prowess floated around the school. We were the nightingales of Green Point. Unhappily, the floor of the stage on to which we filed on the day had been polished until it shone like a mirror. The third boy in slipped and fell flat. The two following, unable to stop in time, joined him with a splay of arms. By the time they had dusted themselves down, the rest of us were in a helpless heap. The choir was presented at half-strength or slightly under. I don't remember singing a note. We came second. Undeterred, the College announced a production of The Pirates Of Penzance. Herbie Heap, a stocky little chap from Standard V with oodles of confidence, was chosen as the Major General, and Ronnie Pinn, Titian-haired son of the Musical Director, was to play his mother's namesake, Mabel. Mr Capon, a floppy Italian artist with rather a lot of blackheads, was to design and paint the scenery and apply the make-up to the actors. I, to my horror, was to be one of the chorus girls who entered singing 'Climbing Over Rocky Mountain'. Naturally, all the grown-ups at rehearsal thought it wildly funny as we skipped in holding our skirts and flirted with

Straight Face

pirates and policemen "- who were lucky enough to broken voices. The words and music of Gilbert and Sullivan have remained with me all these years. In fact, were the D'Oyly Carte Company to telephone tomorrow and announce a production, I could, despite my deep misgivings about having to wear a frock, go on and be word and note perfect. The frock in question was peach-coloured satin, and there was a large picture-hat, reinforced with buckram, which was secured under my chin by a dainty peach bow. Before the dress rehearsal, we were ordered to take our costumes home to be ironed. The following day, clutching a very large cardboard box, I boarded the bus for school. When we got to the school stop, I tugged at the bell and, bearing my container as though it were a priceless treasure, inched my way from the front seat past the crowded seats of stern businessmen. Suddenly the bus swerved, the box flew from my grasp and the tell-tale frock, so lovingly pressed by my doting mother, flew out like a flag on a windy day, dainty slippers hit the windowpanes, while the whole upper deck erupted with laughter as I made frantic attempts to retrieve my items of female attire. Mercifully that ghastly hat which would sit on my head like a halo had remained in the box to spare my further blushes. Cramming the crumpled costume back into the box, I fled down the steps of the bus on to the pavement, painfully conscious that every eye was upon me. The Pirates was a triumph. That shameful moment so many of us had dreaded, when we girls skipped on, surprised us all. It stopped the show. And how we all loved it from that moment on. Mr Capon's sets were magnificent. He was a scenic artist in the old style, but when his creations were erected on the school boxing-ring and subtly lit, those over-purple shadows and exaggerated perspectives worked like magic. He made us up in one of the classrooms. It was my introduction to a corn· modity on which I was to become dependent when I became a professional actor, Leichner's greasepaint. Each tube or stick 39

Nigel Hawthorne

had a number which was used to achieve different effects. There were colours for the base - Five and Nine for juveniles with a dash of Eight, Lake for shading, liners for lining, orange sticks for painting in wrinkles, powder to set it, a rabbit's foot to dust it, and Crowes Cream to take it all off at the end. The smell of the greasepaint was intoxicating to my young nostrils. It was rumoured that Madame Leichner, its inventor, used to take healthy bites out of sticks of it and greedily chew them to convince potential customers of the product's purity. It is something I've never felt obliged to try. But what a night it was! And what cheering when we all trouped on to take our bows. On the way home in the car, I machine-gunned my parents with questions. Did they like this bit, did they like that? Wasn't the Major General good, and how about Ruth and the Pirate King? I don't believe they were all that impressed really, it was, after all, only a school show, but I think what did impress them was my enthusiasm. They'd never seen me quite so animated. Then my voice broke. If only it could have changed overnight like most other boys I knew, all would have been fine. It took months. The more it cracked, the more my Dad insisted on mocking it with a yodel. It only seemed to add to my troubles. My moods started to blacken. I found it difficult to shake them off. I was beginning to despair. Was this growing up? Well, of course it was but no one had explained. While other boys were meeting behind the bike sheds, bravely chain-smoking in a grown-up way, I was going it alone. School was no help, just a punitive system where we were frightened into learning. I envied the Jewish boys preparing for their bar mitzvas. It gave them a focus to their lives which I sorely lacked. Like the Catholic boys chanting the Hail Mary, I was going along with it all without understanding why, only living because l happened to be alive. I suppose, in hindsight, I should have sought advice from my father. Yet, I was becoming aware that he didn't really have much time for me. I wasn't his sort

Straight Face

of boy. When all the others were bringing girlfriends home, where were mind l felt that I was a disappointment to him. He would have wanted me to box, captain the College Fifteen, be taller, cleverer, better-looking and have better prospects than any other boy in the school. I didn't fit the bi!L There were two sons, that was true, but I was the elder and, besides, John was asthmatic which gave him preference. Also John liked cars which didn't interest me - in fact, I didn't learn to drive one until I was nearly fifty. In a way, I could see Dad's point. Yet, I didn't know what on earth I could do about it. And there had been the incident with 'The Gorilla'. There was one Brother who was the absolute embodiment of a gorilla. Quite short and ruddy complexioned, he wore metal-framed spectacles and, when angry, which was frequently, the natural red of his face would become purple. He was a fearsome sight. He was also addicted to the strap. Yet, there was a softer side to him. Once, during exams, when I had mumps for a second time, he got on a bus and came over to the house to invigilate while I wrote my papers. My mother cooked him lunch and he smoked a cigarette in the garden. Exams, in those early days of the war, were an oddity. We answered papers prepared by the College of Preceptors in England. Each of our contributions had then to be mailed six thousand miles across the Atlantic, braving attacks by Heinkels and U-boats, and there wasn't a single boy in the class who, at the end of every year, didn't earnestly pray that the boat bearing them would be torpedoed. 'The Gorilla' had taken rather a shine to me. Now, we were all wise to grown-ups who got up to that sort of thing, We even angled to catch the A,r bus with a certain conductor. When he did his rounds collecting fares, if you allowed this conductor to nm his fingers up your short-trousered leg, you usually managed to get let off with a free ride. When everyone had gone home from school one afternoon, I was rummaging through my desk for a book !' d forgotten

Nigel Hawthorne

when, to my astonishment, a stocky figure in black appeared from nowhere, and without a word of warning, hurled himself at me in a flying rugby tackle. For what seemed like hours, we wrestled on the floor of the classroom as 'The Gorilla', purpling by the minute, struggled to get his hand up my short trousers while l, practically wetting myself with laughter, tried to prise him off. We tired after a while and the incident went no further, though I shudder to think what might have happened had the beady-eyed Brother McEvoy made an appearance while we were rolling about. Neither 'The Gorilla' nor I referred to what had taken place again. Being wartime, we were told that we were to be cadets, and one hot summer's day we were marched down to the armoury, which was at the back of where the Brothers lived, and handed a rifle. The school band, which comprised pipers, buglers and side-drummers, as well as one of the seniors draped in a leopard skin whacking the big drum, was formed up ahead of us, the command was given and we were marched round and round the asphalted cricket field until we dropped. This may sound like an exaggeration, but I remember it very clearly. Boys ahead of me keeled over in the heat of the day and gashed their heads on the hard surface. They lay where they fell. The cricket field looked as though we'd been setting the scene for the re-creation of the Battle of the Somme. It was barbaric. I refused to succumb, marching doggedly round and round again, the rifle digging into my bony shoulder. They weren't going to get me to faint. My elder sister Sheila was even more severely afflicted with introspection than I was. She had been an enchantingly pretty little girl, but when adolescence struck she began to lose all her self-confidence. Her hair became straight and mousy, so she parted it in the middle and yanked it back over her ears like one of the Bronte sisters, catching it behind the nape of her neck with an elastic band. Her body language mirrored her despondency. It became painful for her

to walk into a crowded room so she edged in crab-wise. She found it hard to smile; it was as though she was forcing her lips to part across her teeth. She shut herself away and wrote poetry, going into long periods of silence and deep, dark moods. Even today, despite having had a happy mar· riage with six children and an increasing number of grandchildren, she is still desperately shy. What was it about the Hawthornes that brought this about? The twins were shy, too, but far more outgoing than Sheila and L As a result, my elder sister and I became very close. l was the intermediary when fights broke out between John and Sheila. He'd tease her mercilessly and she'd give chase. My mother came to know that I could sort things out and effect a temporary truce. One winter, Sheila began sending her poems to the Squirrel Club, a children's section in the weekend Cape Times, and they were published. It must have given her a good deal of gratification to see her name in print, but any good which might have been done was shortly to be undermined by a series of poison-pen letters she was sent which featured her poetry in a derogatory way. It was cruel and scary. Each letter had been cut from a newspaper the way gangsters do, and pasted on a blank sheet to form a sentence. We thought we knew who was responsible - a sister of a friend, even the friend himself - but nothing was ever proved. We concluded it was born out of envy. It didn't stop her writing, nor the poison-pen letters from arriving. None of us seemed to be maturing happily despite all the physical beauty we had around us, the fresh air, the freedom. We just couldn't seem to get going. John, my brother, was shunted around from school to school, never able to settle. Nowadays, he would have been identified as dyslexic, but then he was thought lazy or backward or both, so Dad moved him on, desperately hoping that he would settle down. My sister Janette went to a convent school. She was no intellectual, but met things head on in a cheerful and carefree way, looking 43

Nigel Hawthorne

forward to the time that she could catch the bus from school and be with her beloved horses. Then there was Sheila. And there was me.

44

4 Bioscope

In many ways, South Africa was, and probably still is, lagging behind the times, and being in Cape Town was like living somewhere that hadn't caught up. There was a great determination to be sophisticated and in touch, but six thousand miles separated us from what was going on, and we were doomed to be colonial. The war distanced us even further. When l was at school there was almost no live theatre, and the little there was was usually amateur. This doesn't mean to say that sometimes it wasn't rather good and performed with affection; the word amateur, after all, sterns from the Latin verb 'to love'. Occasionally the big syndicate, African Consolidated Theatres, which owned the lion's share of the cinemas, would use those with acceptable proportions for stage plays, often performed by local semi-professional companies with an imported English star above the title. I remember seeing pantomimes with Lucan and McShane, Tommy Trinder and Ivor Novello in an approximation of a pantomime, Perchance To Dream. Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, who became a close friend many years later, toured with her partner, the stocky Marcia Vanne, in both Shakespeare and contemporary successes such as Ernlyn Williams's The Wind Of Heaven, Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit and J. M. Barrie's What Every Woman Knows. Both women were firmly established actresses in the London theatre. Another touring group was the Munro/Inglis Company, run by Nan Munro and Margaret Inglis, two highly accomplished and successful actresses, both South African. Mostly, however, our tastes were directed towards the bioscope as it was still called - rather proving my point about lagging behind. 45

Nigel Hawthorne

The three main cinemas in town in those days were the Coliseum, the Plaza and a fantastical 'Spanish' auditorium, the Alhambra, with fake cypress trees, Moorish architecture, and a night sky with twinkling stars. Occasionally the Alhambra was the chosen venue for theatrical presentations. It was large, so productions were generally on a grand scale, and, after the final curtain had fallen, the audience would trickle across the road in their finery to dine at the Del Monico. I remember seeing a passion play at the Alhambra in which Christ was represented by a follow-spot for, in those days, He wasn't permitted to be portrayed by an actor. It must have been very difficult for the Disciples to play the more intimate scenes with a glorified Tinker Bell (the voice was disembodied as well). The actors were obliged to stare devoutly into space while it was their nightly fate to be dominated by the unfairly amplified and sonorous boom of the Son of Man. For the bioscope, audiences would dress up as though for the theatre. It was an evenL There was no slopping around in any old thing, unless, of course, you were visiting one of the bio-cafes which were usually off the beaten track, distinctly seedy, and where they slammed a tray on the ledge in front of you so that you could tuck into a meal while watching the film. You had to be fairly undiscriminating about your diet on these occasions as the food was served in the dark, and you had no way of checking what might be on your plate or in your cup. Generally speaking, it was wiser to leave it to one side and give your full attention to the film. Brother Nelson was an Australian. He walked with a pro· nounced limp, which was generally assumed by my schoolmates to have been the result of having a ball and chain attached to his ankle while serving as a convict. He decided that he was snfficiently handy with a projector to introduce a film evening once a week. He selected a Friday night so that it shouldn't conflict with homework. We began seeing films first of all in one of the upstairs classrooms, but popularity

Straight Face

soon obliged him to move down to the hall in the quadrangle. Tbere was invariably a Popeye, Oswald Rabbit or Felix the Cat, but the quality of a great deal of the more light-hearted American short items was distinctly variable. Rarely were we shown feature films of any merit, a missed opportunity typical of the Brothers; they were usually about gangsters or cowboys like Hopalong Cassidy. I think we must have seen almost every film William Boyd ever made, and got to know every rock in the Hollywood Hills like an old friend. If you had been lucky enough to win a Merit Card for achievement in the classroom that week, you got in for nothing, and as there was always pressure on pupils to 'support the College', a full house was practically guaranteed. The film would break down repeatedly for various technical reasons or just plain incompetence, and Brother Nelson wasted a good deal of time as he painstakingly rethreaded the tangle of celluloid. Despite all this, so began my love of the cinema, indicating, l like to think, the emergence of a child of some imagination. I was eleven and a bit when the Germans bombed Coventry, and I can still see my father's face as he weighed the news in disbelief. On a balmy Cape evening in November, so very far away from it all, it was difficult for us to imagine the grey, densely-packed city we'd left only eight years previously now so cruelly devastated, its inhabitants distraught and its Cathedral, where we'd all been baptised and my parents married, a smouldering shell. Our own contribution to the war had been strangely tepid - as if we were playing a game of Let's Pretend. Dad, well beyond the age of conscription, was head of the St John's Ambulance on our side of the mountain, so, as children, we would act as guinea-pigs while he and the volunteer nurses put our arms and legs in splints, bandaged our heads, and submitted to being carried around on stretchers. There was a small shelter in Camps Bay - just the one, as far as I remember-· so heaven help us had there been an air raid.

47

NigBl IIau;thorne

We children dng one of our own on the vacant plot next dooL We managed to get it quite deep and it might even have been serviceable, watched over as it was by a protective photograph of Mr Churchill cut from The Outspan magazine, Being on the coast, we were obliged to observe blackouts, for there was a remote possibility that we might have been spied by a passing U-boat which had lost its way, So up went the blackout curtains, while the headlamps on the car - a German DKW (illustrating yet again my father's disregard for convention) - had part of the glass painted out so that only the minimum of light would show, Early on there was no rationing, though there was a shortage of certain foodstuffs, Scotch was expensive as it was imported but, if you needed to drink claret by the gallon - and there were those that did it would cost you as little as five shillings, Butter was one and eightpence a pound, the same price as bacon, while a pound of tea was two and eleven, You could get fifty cigarettes for a shilling, and a brand-new Studebaker would cost under three hundred pounds, When, at the beginning of hostilities, Chamberlain had made his doomladen speech, 'I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received,' we all sat around the radio-cum-record-player scarcely daring to breathe, yet there were many South Africans who were in two minds as to whether we should join in, it being Europe's war, Most people suspected that many Afrikaners had no intention of siding with the British whatever the enemy when the treatment we , meted out in the Boer War concentration camps still rankled, as indeed did all the indignities of imperialism, and a large number were actively pro-Nazi, But in Parliament the old soldier Smuts won the day by thirteen votes and, only three days after Britain and France had declared war, South Africa had taken up the gauntlet on behalf of the Allies, We became very used to seeing men in khaki, particularly when the Mediterranean became a no-go area for the Allies 48

Straight Fc1ce

and troopships would find their way to the East, as they did in Vasco da Gama's day, via the Cape. A journalist called Lucy Bean, who my father said 'Liked the sound of her own voice', elevated herself to celebrity status by inaugurating a campaign of hospitality for visiting troops, and the kindness and generosity meted out to them by the citizens of Cape Town became legendary. Often we would see groups of Tommies strolling by the front of our house, puffing away at their Woodbines and taking in the view, so we'd leap upon them, invite them in, take their names and addresses and write to their families back home (not mentioning the name of their ship for security reasons) just to say that they'd been round for tea and were well and in good spirits. I remember the time the Aussies landed - going the other way, that is to say clockwise - and how badly they behaved, smashing the plate glass windows of big department stores, taking over the buses and trams and generally roughing up the town. All was forgiven because of the war, and there was perhaps a smug satisfaction in seeing others behave rather worse than we did. I should have been brighter at school than I was. I had shown promise earlier, but, as time went by and I became more and more self-conscious, I began to lose confidence. When exams came round, I'd stare in panic at the questions, unable to find a way of responding. I could hear the seconds ticking by on the clock over the door, the squeak of the invigilator's shoes as he patrolled the aisles, the dipping of pens in porcelain inkwells, the scratch of nibs, a sneeze, a cough, the traffic going by outside. Sometimes, it was almost as though I wasn't really present - as though it were part of a dream. It wasn't lack of preparation, for l was always conscientious to a fault. The preponderance of scientific and mathematical subjects in the curriculum hampered me, it was true, but I should have done better than I did in the manageable subjects - English, History and Geography. Outside examination periods were 49

Nigel Hawthorne

I to be asked a question in class, quite often I would stand for what seemed hours, my mind a total blank, feeling that every eye in the room was upon me. I seemed to have no armour which would protect me, no bluff which might turn disadvantage into advantage. I feared rejection far more than the strap, so that, instead of stepping forward confidently into manhood, I was retreating, without knowing why. Nowadays, when there's a problem child, the parents are called in to discuss matters with the teachers, though I don't think that people recognised that I had a problem - least of all my parents. And perhaps I hadn't. It was all in my head. Whatever the pains I might have been experiencing as a growing boy, they didn't seem important enough to discuss. In my last year I was summoned to a private pep-talk with Brother McEvoy, as was each boy in the class. He didn't ask me to sit down, just gazed at me, his eyes only half open, as if torn between his position as head of the school who was responsible for both my education and my future, and an even more pressing need to fall asleep. Some minutes went by before he spoke and I was beginning to feel very ill at ease. At last he made up his mind as to what it was that he needed to say. 'Hawthorne,' he began, 'what will become of you?' That was it. No more. Perhaps my parents migbt have helped me, for surely, surely, they must have been aware of my dilemma. It was my own fault for not having gone to them with my problems. I have always been independent - the Aries in me - and felt that I should find my own way in life without enlisting the help of others. I've kept to this policy, with only a handful of lapses when I was really desperate. I'm grateful to my parents for many things. My presence on this earth to start with. The happy and healthy environment in which I was brought up. The way they gave me moral support despite having disapproved of my choices. Of course my Dad was angry when I walked away from University to join a professional company as an actor. l can appreciate

Straight Face

how such a seemingly irresponsible act must have infuriated him, yet it's a decision I have never for a moment regretted. There were other lessons they taught me, and it is for these that l owe them the most thanks. We were brought np to do as we were told, to speak when we were spoken to and not to answer back, to behave at table, to stand erect and without fidgeting when the National Anthem was played, to respect our elders, not to lie and not to cheat. These principles have guided me through life. Dad was a man of honour. All right, he was the most terrible flirt, and there were times when he led my mother the most awful dance. But, given that he was culpable of masculine frailties, he was honest. It was a quality I much admired in him and one which I have done my utmost to emulate. Conscious of his gullibility, people less scrupulous than he would try to take advantage of him, as they have done - and do - with me, but his strength was his honesty and they couldn't touch that. We were coming to the end of our schooling. The Gilbert and Sullivan fad had slowed down a bit. I hadn't been in The Mikado, as my harassed parents thought the time might be better employed with my nose in my books. Then the school decided to revive that old favourite, The Pirates Of Penzance. Once again, I took no part. Until, that is, I was summoned to Brother McEvoy's office early one morning - a rare privilege -where he solemnly informed me, 'Bernard Culhane has been taken ill. Can you go on tonight as the Pirate King?' It was the mixture of heaven and hell at one go. But, yes of course I could! I was thrown into the arms of the latest producer, an elocutionist by the name of Sybil Marks. All day long she coached me. It had been six years since I'd climbed over rocky mountains as one of the girls, but a lot of the words and the tunes had remained with me. That night I went on to a packed house. I got to the Pirate King's song, my solo, 'Oh better far to live and die, under the brave black flag I

Nigel Hawthorne

fly'. I was going great guns until I couldn't remember how the second verse began. Instead of panicking, I just sang the first verse twice. With the piano thundering away below I don't suppose many could hear the words anyway. The evening was a triumph and, the following morning, Brother McEvoy of all people came up to me and, placing a suspiciously friendly hand upon my shoulder, solemnly announced, 'Hawthorne. You saved the college!' Nobody had ever given me such praise before. Suddenly, after years in the background, I was the centre of attention. Everybody wanted to shake me by the hand. It was the equivalent of my having flattened the school boxing champion, bowled out Len Hutton first ball, or scored the winning try in the last thirty seconds. But there was no time for success to go to my head. My parents quite rightly insisted that I should set all that aside and concentrate on finishing my studies. In any case, the following evening Bernard Culhane returned to his role, rather ungratefully complaining that I'd ripped one of the cardboard tops that folded over the Wellington boots he wore in the show - something I might well have done in the heat of the moment - but l thought the least he could have done was to thank me for covering for him. Secretly, though, I was relieved it was all over and that I'd got through it without having made a hash of things. I couldn't help being intrigued by how nervous I'd been when I'd heard the audience taking their seats before the performance, yet how that had evaporated once the curtains had parted and the stage lights were up. I'd enjoyed myself, felt an exhilaration, a freedom - even a pride at having been part of the show. I'd dared to improvise when I couldn't remember the right words, knowing the audience to be completely on my side. I had grown tall and leggy, outstripping my father - a source of great pride to him. l was determined to reach six foot. l knew how thrilled he would be. On the strip of wall alongside the dividing doors between our dining and sitting rooms, our 52

Straig;hl Face

respective heights were noted regularly in penciL Being the tallest in the family seemed to be my greatest claim to fame. It was certainly my best chance of continuing in my father's good books. Also, it was around this time that I suspected that I might be Jesus Christ. This had nothing to do with my height, naturally, indeed very little to do with anything other than the confusion going on within my changing mind and body. I knew that I was different from other boys. I looked the same, yet I thought in a different way, at least I presumed I did; I had no way of knowing for sure. There was a boy called Tony whom just about everybody in the class admired. He seemed so handsome, so confident and so at ease with himself that it was hard not to envy him. He wasn't particularly bright or good at sports, but the warmth of his personality made us vie for his attention. I know this to be true because several of the boys I spoke to in later years admitted it to me. He had a magnetism which made us want to set him on a pedestal. When it came to carrying a torch for Tony I was no exception, though I very much doubt whether we exchanged more than half a dozen words the whole time we were at school. I was far too paralysed with shyness. Of course it wasn't only the boys who found him personable - the girls did too. In their droves. He seemed to be surrounded by admirers. So why, if other boys besides myself found him so attractive, did I imagine myself to be so different? The answer was simple in its complexity. I'd come to realise that I felt more deeply about him. I didn't even know what l meant. He wasn't just someone I could glance at and think, 'I wish I looked like that.' There was an uncomfortable disturbance deep within me which I couldn't for the life of me understand. As boys around me began to boast of their conquests with girls, how they'd chatted them up at the bus stop, how they' cl snagged in the back row of the bioscope, l had to keep silent. I'd had none of these experiences. Nor had l wanted them. Indeed, 53

Nigel Hawthorne

girls whose company I shared most: days of the week - like pretty Marjorie Hustwick -· must have wondered why; what they could have done to offend me. !' d turned into a loner. Then the mists began to clear. There was a reason for my being different. I had been sent to earth on a mission. I was the new Messiah. The obvious place, therefore, towards which I should gravitate would seem to be the Church. Here I would learn about myself and my various connections both national and international. I became passionately involved. I went to confirmation classes in addition to choir practice, was confirmed by the Bishop, served at Holy Communion - in fact, it was almost as though the parish church of St Peter's in Camps Bay had become my second home. I read not just the Bible (well, not all of it) but every religious book on which I could lay my hands and, when I found out that my own mother had been neither baptised nor confirmed, I telephoned the Bishop to ask for his advice, talked my dear, patient mother into attending instruction and, in due course, would be present as a witness at both her baptism and her confirmation. My sanctimony didn't end there. I set up a makeshift altar in my bedroom and invited my sister Sheila to attend services. Rather surprisingly, she went along with it. I look back on my behaviour now with horror. I must have been a real little prig, a major pain in the neck. There was, however, a redeeming feature which was to end my compulsive swallow-dive towards the priesthood as suddenly as it had begun. Mr Fenton, the vicar at Camps Bay, having no pulpit, would position himself in the aisle separating the front pews and the altar to deliver his sermons. An explosive speaker, he would accompany his sermon with flamboyant gestures, a good deal of coughing and sniffing, while the nearest surface - usually the pew - would be thumped repeatedly for emphasis. A welcome irreverence was beginning to seep into my church attendances. It hadn't escaped my notice that Mr Fenton enjoyed his tipple 54

Straight Face

and that, at Holy Communion, he would fill the chalice with rather more wine than was strictly necessary for so sparse a congregation, Later on in the service, one of my duties as a server was to replenish the chalice with wine and water, enabling the priest to rinse the cup and imbibe the contents, I used to allow rather more water than wine, He never referred to the matter but I will always remember the dangerous look he would flash me as he raised the chalice to his lips, And there was worse to come, Sermons appeared to be sacrosanct. It wasn't fair, You couldn't put up your hand as you would at school and say, 'I didn't understand that bit.' The vicar would seal the end of his weekly sermon by turning to the altar, making the sign of the Cross and muttering, 'In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen,' In other words, that was that, Nobody had the chance of arguing a point. One evensong, I took in a notebook and, over a period of weeks, wrote down things I didn't understand and needed explaining, Finally, l bearded him in the sacristy, He looked at me in alarm as I reeled off my questions and then, by way of humouring me, gave a few rather vague replies, These I wouldn't accepL Fenton showed his impatience, obviously anxious to get over to the rectory to greet his parishioners, and here was this wretched boy trying to catch him out while he was struggling to remove his vestments, The situation worsened. I wasn't taking prisoners, If he couldn't give me satisfactory answers to what I wanted to know, then I couldn't possibly attend church again. And I said so, The poor man floundered under my onslaught but we both knew that my mind was made up, For months he used to roar up on his motorbike trying to persuade me to return, but I never did, I was following in my grandmother's footsteps, finding my faith in the world around me rather than being persuaded by ritual and ceremony, I may have cast the poor vicar into outer darkness, but his wife Mary still held my esteem, Being a keen amateur actress

55

Nigel Hawthorne

herself, she had frequently put on shows in our parish hall. One day she encountered a tempestuous young sailor with a London accent and a beaky nose, She'd seen him strolling about Camps Bay on his own, assumed he was lonely and had offered him a lift. I have since suspected that he sought company of a different persuasion, He let slip that he was a West End actor and had appeared opposite John Gielgud in Gordon Daviot's Richard Of Bordeaux, although there was no mention of his name in the cast list at the front of the published play, But he did seem to know what he was talking about, He took our tiny stage and transformed it with a series of ingeniously improvised paraffin-tin lamps and dimmers into a really efficient unit, he taught us make-up and put on a production of an Emlyn Williams play called The Late Christopher Bean in which Mary Fenton played Gwenny, the leading role. It was a great success and people came from miles around to see us, The following year we did several one-act plays, and I was in a rather preposterous drama called The Astonished Heart by Noel Coward, after which I was ticked off by my mother for gulping down 'martinis' with undue haste, She advised me that even a seasoned drinker would have been flat on his back within minutes at the rate I'd consumed them, The productions were purely amateur, of course, but I was getting a taste for the theatre and the people in it which must have worried my parents, for I was in the throes of Matriculation - my final exams at schooL With the family rapidly growing up, the demands made on my father's limited purse strings were proving uncomfortable, It was perfectly true that, during the war, he'd had the area very much to himself, So many of his medical rivals were in khaki. But Dad was, by now, in his sixties and any prospects of slowing down, which I'm sure he would have liked to do, seemed pretty remote, My poor dear mother had no money of her own and her own mother was living on the smell of a paint rag, No, my father was the sole source of income, Dad didn't 56

Straight Face

believe in spending money unless he had to. ·when arrived, my mother had to beg him to let her have some cash to buy provisions. Each week, the most terrible row would ensue, 'I'm not made of money. Where's it all going to come from? l can't afford to be paying out all the time!' It would have been far simpler to have allowed my mother a certain amount each week for household expenses, but my father had no intention of changing the habit of a lifetime. If we, as children, wanted money to go to the bioscope, get a season ticket for the bus, buy birthday or Christmas presents - it was a battle royal. Dad was obsessed with waste. At mealtimes, we had to finish every crumb. 'If you didn't want it you shouldn't have asked for it.' Presents qualified as a waste. Our own presents were very modest, though I remember once receiving a bicycle which l was told was American. Its tyres were very wide, and it was extremely heavy. It took all my strength to budge it more than a few feet. Eventually, it lay neglected at the back of the garage, grist to my father's mill - 'and when I buy him something he doesn't use it' - when money matters were being argued. At school l became very conscious that I was just about the only senior boy who didn't own a sports jacket. Our blazers had such vivid stripes that they seemed rather extravagant garments on semi-formal occasions like going into town or going by train to visit my grandmother. I explained to my Dad that it would be very nice if I could get out of my school uniform occasionally, but I got the familiar response. One day he took pity on me and asked me up to his bedroom. Dad had long before moved out of the double bed he and my mother had shared, and slept on the verandah. There were canvas blinds which could be let down during the winter, when he would smother his bed with rugs and everything waterproof he could lay his hands on. He seemed to sleep impervious to the gales which threatened to wrench the blinds from their moorings, his vigoroLis snores, as the rain bucketed over him, reverberating around the house and keeping the rest of us 57

Nigel Hawthorne

awake. In their bedroom, my mother and he had a wardrobe each, my Dad's being twice the size of my mother's. It was a magnificent mahogany piece we' cl brought from England, with racks for his black ties, rails for his black shoes, hanging space for his collection of black jackets and striped trousers and special cubicles for his stiff collars. From the back of this cumbersome piece of furniture he pulled a brown woollen suit. Opening up the jacket, he pointed to the label inside which proclaimed 'Harris Tweed' and invited me to sniff the cloth. It had a musty smell with which I was familiar as he would occasionally wear the suit when he was off-duty. The material was thick and coarse, hot to wear and ginger-brown in colour. 'We'll go down to my tailor in Long Street,' he told me. 'He'll make you something.' I hadn't quite taken on board that my Dad's intention was to have a sports jacket made from the jacket of the suit. His Cape Malay tailor took time to make his decision. 'I'm afraid, Doctor,' he concluded as I stood there, swathed in tweed, 'there's no way this jacket is going to fit this boy. However much I take it in, you see, it will always be too big.' My father fmmd it hard to conceal his disappointment. Finally, he had a brainwave. 'Make it out of the trousers!' In due course and after several fittings, I was allowed to bring my sports jacket back home. By then it had turned into a loathsome thing. In his effort to make the rest of the jacket look as good as possible, the tailor had concealed the large assortment of irregular bits and pieces underneath the sleeve so that when I lifted my arm there was a sort of jigsaw puzzle on the underside. Determining to keep my arms by my sides at all costs, I wore it to the school bioscope that Friday. Someone dubbed me 'Sackcloth and Ashes' and the name stuck. My father was increasingly out in the evenings. He had become a prominent Freemason, being Grandmaster of this Lodge and that, and was also a member of the M.O.T.H.S. (Memorable Order Of Tin Hats), the Owl Club, the Rotary

Straip;ht face

Club and a fol!nder member of the Oxford and Cambridgr Society, which would meet for a dinner on Boat nighL My mother, who, in common with the other wives, would not normally be expected to attend many of these functions, cornpensated by going to whist drives and beetle drives and sometimes the bridge or gin rummy eq uivalenL They had both joined the Camps Bay Bowling Club, but it was my mother who revealed an unexpected talent. She entered the VI estern Province Novice Cup - and won. The following year, she won the Open Cup. I don't think it had been done before. lt was a thrill for us all to see our mother the centre of attention. Her role, for far too long, had been to look after the household, do the cooking and the shopping, tend to my father, bring up the children and drop everything to answer the phone which always seemed to ring at mealtimes. 'Three, nine, eight, double one, five, Dr Hawthorne's house?' Then, after a pause, 'Charlie, it's Mrs Absolorn. Can you pop in and see her this evening?' And, from the dining room, 'No, I damn well can't. Tell her I'm out.' Now it was her moment. She was photographed for the papers, and in the house the trophies were given pride of place for a whole year. Dad was never very good at bowls and didn't particularly enjoy it. He couldn't see what all the fuss was about. He hadn't the patience. Added to which, the club blazer with its vivid stripes didn't go with his ruddy complexion. He stuck to team events and avoided singles until finally he got bored and gave it up. The war was entering its most dramatic phase, the invasion. We all had charts and marked the progress of the Allies on a daily basis. As we listened to the news on the wireless, at last, here was something to which we could relate. Not just a series of bombing attacks but a concerted advance into enemy lines. It was enormously exciting. In celebration, l made a model Spitfire out of balsa wood and tissue paper from a kit. On its maiden flight it fell to the gronnd, shattered beyond repair. It was just about my only contribution to the war effort. 59

·-:)',

,$~i~}'.~-:-: '.:

Nigel Hawthorne

Secretly, I was considerably relieved as, had it continued, I should have had to join up, Now, with the smell of victory in the air, with any luck, I'd be let off the hook, I don't suppose even then we realised how lucky we'd been to have escaped it alL There had been little or no privations, we'd come through unscathed, though sons and daughters of friends inevitably were killed in action or posted missing, The family hadn't been separated, we'd had all the food we needed, vegetables, fruit and chocolate, Our limbs had grown sturdy in the sunshine and sea air, and our lungs had benefited from regular climbs and horse rides up the mountain, As I prepared to take my first faltering steps into the great, wide world, and we, the Hawthorne family, proudly swung our Christmas lights across the front of the house in the shape of a 'V' for victory, the bewilderment with which puberty had plagued me showed no sign of disappearing. I assumed it would go when it was time for it to go, I proudly measured my height on the wall and clocked six foot exactly if I stood very straight and held my breath. School at long last was behind me. No more Brother this and Brother that. No more strap. I was a young man. I used my father's razor to shave, and, haunted though I was by Brother McEvoy's discouraging lament, 'Hawthorne, what will become of you?', l felt that something would. Something. I didn't know what.

60

5 Nou; What?

One of the most enduring lessons we learned at Christian Brothers' College was guilt. Never could it be levelled at our Roman Catholic teachers that they tried to make converts of us. It was as though there was a pact. Indeed all religious instruction doled out to the Protestant and Jewish boys was of a fairly innocuous nature, with one glaring exception which stands out in my memory like a beacon. We were told about Oscar Wilde and his wickedness. Reading from a tract, the Brother responsible told us that Wilde was one of the wickedest men that had ever lived, that he had been sent to prison for his wickedness, where the weight of his crimes was so great that his body had exploded and his entrails had run down the walls of the cell. For those boys who had read Frank Harris and others, this was snigger·worthy, and word of the blatant misrepresentation spread round the school like the bush fires which, on a regular basis in the summer, would sweep across the mountainside. It was, I suppose, an oblique warning to us of the perils of homosexuality. We never found out whether a similar warning had been given to the Catholic boys who probably needed it as much as the rest of us. Insidiously, a feeling of guilt was encouraged, so that we came to question our every action. It has remained with me all my life - as indeed have the 'perils' of homosexuality. Early on, we were introduced to a system of torture known as 'self-·denial'. It was supposed to be character·forming. If, for example, I was expecting an important letter, I would have to bypass the letterbox without opening it, or, if this temptation proved irresistible, or on the spur of the moment I'd forgotten,

Nigel Hawthorne

l would be expected to leave the letter I was anticipating where it lay in the letterbox while removing the others, If it remained there for several days, so much the better, my character would be the stronger for having resisted the temptation, Were I to throw caution to the winds, do the unthinkable and open the letterbox hoping that I hadn't been observed, immediately I would be a ware that I had sinned, Guilt, the accompanying torture, would haunt me, The test was applicable to almost anything enjoyable, and there was even the danger of feeling guilty about feeling guilty, Generally speaking, white South Africans are notoriously selfish people used to being waited on and, even though I had been horn in England and couldn't be classed as a true South African, I grew up as selfish as the resL Compared with other families, even with our limited resources, we had spent the war in the lap of luxury, There were, of course, boys at school whose lives had been more affected than ours, with fathers and brothers fighting in North Africa and Italy, but for the majority of us, I think, the war wasn't an immediate threat and therefore something of an unreality, When news of what had happened in the concentration camps was released, it shocked us to the core - the Jewish boys, in particular, being made horribly aware of how lucky they had been to have spent the war so out of reach, The selfishness came as a direct result of our having been pampered in our homes, We didn't have to lift a finger, All the dirty work was done for us, Katie, Marie, Suzie, Esther, Raebel, Becky, Dolly, Lettie, Queenie, Hattie, Helen and Bessie in their caps and aprons were at hand to scrub, brnsh and clean up after us, Not all at once, but a succession of them trundling their Hoovers and flicking their feather dusters at the cobwebs. Some maids lasted longer than others who stole or drank or sneaked in boyfriends, Some were lazy, didn't turn up, couldn't or wouldn't manage the work, were hopeless at taking telephone messages, had problems getting on with the children, were

Straight Pace

abusive, aggressive, or both, which usually resulted in the police having to be summoned or-horror of horrors- brought bugs. The fumigators would have to be contacted, the room evacuated while they installed their deadly smoke-bombs, tbe doors and windows hermetically sealed until it was deemed safe to go in, and everyone giving the offending maid's room a wide berth as though it were the isolation ward in a fever hospital. Dangling from the doorhandle would be a cardboard sign bearing the skull and crossbones with 'DANGER! KEEP OUT!' written in red in both official languages. Lena Goliath was an exception. To begin with, we knew her surname. She had a very close relationship with my mother. They could sit down over a cup of tea and discuss their respective families, exchange cooking tips and generally gossip to their hearts' content. Lena, being warm-hearted, garrulous yet industrious, fitted in extraordinarily well. We met her first in Queen Victoria Street when she came to work for us in her late teens. She had a naughty streak and was more than a match for the four children. She gave as good as she got and we loved her. On birthdays, a multi-tiered cake would be baked, the lucky one getting to lick the bowl. Often as not, it was a layered sponge covered with icings all the colours of the rainbow and scattered with 'hundreds and thousands', little multi-coloured pellets of sugar, the name of the child spelt out in wobbly writing with chocolate. Though she worked with the family, on and off, for something like forty years, we knew very little about her or even where she lived. The servants' quarters in those early days were above the kitchen and pantry, reached by a winding staircase. In our new home, there was a room specially built on to the back of the house which was hers. It was small and stuffy, no different from 'girls" rooms up and down the country. She held a position similar to a maid in England in the Victorian or Edwardian eras, and we knew no more of her circumstances, nor those of the others who worked for us, than families did then.

Nigel f-Jawthorne

The Cape coloured people infiltrated the sluggishness which characterised the personality of the Western Cape, helping to shake it out of its ditch-water dullness with their energy and humour. This was a segment of the country which bore little relationship to the rest. With its sweeping mountain ranges, its vineyards and rocky coastline, it resembled Europe rather than Africa in feeling as well as appearance though, unlike the north, the majority of the ethnic people were of mixed blood. Even though tribal Africans were present, they were not in as great profusion as they are today. For many generations prior to apartheid, the Cape coloured people chose to keep to their own part of town. Their homes were painfully modest when set beside the often lavish mansions of the whites, sometimes little more than shacks, but they clung together as a community, dependent upon the 'European' - by which was meant the white - for their livelihood. By and large, the relationship wasn't a bad one and, although the economic difference between the races was often considerable, there was harmony and, generally speaking, they were fairly treated. Slaves brought from West Africa, the island of Madagascar and from the East, where Holland ruled the spice trade after the new way through had snatched the monopoly from Venice, bred with the early Dutch and later the Huguenot settlers. Their progeny were the ancestors of the present Cape coloured people, their features as varied as their faiths, their skins offering no conformity of pigmentation, and many passing as white. In Cape Town, they celebrate each New Year with a carnival like a Mardi Gras. It used to be called the Coon Carnival, though I suspect that has been politically corrected. Each troupe would take the whole year to prepare. The finest silks and satins were found and they would dress as minstrels in tailcoats and top hats, incongruously blacking their faces to be sure they looked the part. On 2 January, known as the second New Year, a competition would be held at the Rosebank Showground, and the winners would dance the

Straight Face

night away in the side streets of town and the length and breadth of District Six, strumrning their ukuleles, getting drunker by the minute, the stragglers serenading the world at large with traditional songs like 'Daar kom die Alabama' - the Alabama being one of the old merchant ships which travelled to Batavia in the spice trade days - and 'Sukerbossie', which Eve Boswell later turned into a popular hiL We used to love these carnivals and look forward to them each year, but if we thought that the exuberance demonstrated in those two shorts days and nights was the norm we were misguided. The reality was that poverty and inequality governed their lives. As I grew up in Cape Town, I began to be aware of some of the injustices: the way the police behaved towards them, the way some whites expected them to step to one side when they met on the pavement, the way they always sat at the back, on the buses or at church. Although our lives were intertwined, we kept our distance. In those days, it was accepted that the housewife telephoned the local grocery shop with her order and the goods would be delivered later the same day. With difficulty, a young Cape coloured lad would pedal his bicycle with its outsized wicker basket crammed with provisions along the Victoria Road and carry them up the front steps and to the back door where my mother would check the items against her list. It was customary to take certain goods on approval- items of clothing, for example - so that, if they didn't suit, or didn't fit, they could be returned and the money refunded. It was equally possible for my mother to complain to the butcher that last week's leg of lamb was tough and expect an apology and a complimentary leg of lamb sent as a gesture of good will. Fruit and vegetables were available either at the market or from horse-drawn carts which patrolled the area on certain days of the week. The driver of these carts, whatever his name, was always known as 'Sammy'. One of these drivers, a handsome Cape coloured lad, took a shine to my sister Janette, then in her mid teens. Someone reported to my father that they'd been

Nigel J-lawthorne

seen sitting together on a patch of grass under a tree sharing a joke. Janette was given a stern talking to and that particular 'Sammy' came round no more. l still see Lena when I go back to Cape Town. She's now in her eighties and finds work difficult because of her arthritis, so we take care of her, making sure that there is no need for her to continue scrubbing and polishing other people's houses unless she wants to. She's a gracious old lady with a wonderful spirit and pride, though I can't rid her of the habit of calling me 'Master Nigel' however hard I try-· and she invariably asks me when I'm going to get married. When I think of the loyalty she has shown to my family through the years, the journeys she has had to take to get to and from our various homes on her days off, the sense of humour that she has maintained throughout in the face of the tribulations life has imposed upon her, I can only marvel. She is a very special lady. Dad suggested that I went to see Neville Shute, who was a director of Southern Insurance, the firm which had its offices on the ground floor of the building where he had his consulting rooms. I had yet to make up my mind in which direction my future lay and he thought that insurance might appeal, as well as bringing me in some money. Mr Shute was a debonaire gentleman with public school manners who offered me the job of junior clerk in the Motor Department. It seemed to matter little that I knew nothing about cars and couldn't drive. I had an important-lookin g desk behind the counter so that, when a customer came in, I could leap to my feet and attend to his or her needs. I used to pray they wouldn't ask me a question I didn't understand, though, despite my shyness, I rather enjoyed having this contact with members of the puhlic. It was also my duty to deal with third party motor insurance and issue declarations and tokens when required. Some of these requests came from out of town and there was a drawer in my desk reserved for them which, one day,! hoped

66

Straight Face

to get round to answering. When I was off sick with a tmnmy bug, they went through my desk and discovered rather a lot of these letters, so, on my return, being confronted with my misdemeanour, I fully expected to be given the sack though, for some reason, they decided to keep me on. As I wasn't enjoying the job at all I think I might have welcomed the push, though the resultant confrontation with my father might have been awkward. The head of the Motor Department was Lewis Lewis, a breezy, middle-aged man with a large moustache, who enjoyed his food and seemed to be thoroughly at ease with the world in which he lived. One of the reasons for this must surely have been that he spent as little time as possible at his desk. Around the periphery of the high-ceilinged office where we all worked was a partition which comprised units occupied by senior members of the department. There was a frosted glass door which bore the incumbent's name. That named for Lewis Lewis was invariably closed and no discernible movement could be detected within. It was I947, the year of the royal visit. We were given special dispensation to shut up the office on the day the King and Queen and the princesses drove from the docks up Adderley Street, and we stood shoulder to shoulder amongst the heaving throng waving our flags and cheering ourselves hoarse. Several of the more diehard Afrikaans clerks gave the procession a miss to take advantage of the deserted beaches, but for the rest of us, it was with a tremendous feeling of pride that we welcomed the royal visitors and, when we saw how uncomfortable by comparison the Governor General and his wife looked in all their finery - for they were the Van Zyls, Afrikaners to their fingertips - there was more than a feeling of smug satisfaction. Mr Lewis was a film-maker. It was this hobby which so frequently dominated his working day. Early one afternoon, he shut up shop, pulled down the blinds and we were each

Nigel Hawthorne

invited to find a seat in one of the larger booth partitions located at the rear of the office. A projector had been set up and, in glorions technicolor, we watched his film of a trip from St Helena in a two-masted schooner, rigged fore and aft with topgallant sails on the foremast, the boat pitching and tossing in the turbulent sea. I sat enthralled. Mr Lewis knew what he was doing after all. His feeling for film - even with the minimal experience I possessed - was remarkable. Here was no amateur but an artist to his fingertips, with each frame demonstrating his flair. He was not unaware of my enthusiasm - Eisenstein with his acolyte. He promised another film the following week, and once again we sat round on the floor of the little back room to watch. No such romantic excursion this time round. It was a heart operation in grisly detail. I don't remember too much about it as I keeled over early on and had to be revived by Miss Knowles, the cashier who had befriended me. Neither of us being married helped and I could go to her with my woes - well, some of them. My unmanly behaviour during the screening of Mr Lewis's film didn't exactly enhance my standing in the Motor Department, but watching it that afternoon began to stimulate an interest in me outside the tedious realms of motor insurance - and it had very little to do with running away to sea. It was Mr Van Heerden, I remember, an Afrikaner working as an agent for the company, who pointed the way. In idle moments, I had taken to doodling on the back of my notebook. My early efforts were never very good, but I had a certain flair and drew with enjoyment. One day, I became aware that I was being observed. I swung round in Christian Brothers guilt. 'What the fuck are you doing wasting your time in a place like this? Get out and do something useful with your life!' His tone was brusque - almost impatient. He strode off through the swing doors. As I waited for them to settle, l began to consider what he had said. l had taken a year out of my life to please my Dad, but it must have been clear to everybody

68

Straight Pace

from Mr Lewis down that motor insurance was not something which would obsess me till my dying day. I asked my father whether he would let me go to University and, to my surprise, he agreed. Perhaps Mr Shute had had a word with hirrL The only trouble was that I had no idea what to do with my degree, should I be lucky enough to get one. A friend mentioned that you could take a BA with a diploma in broadcasting , of all things. If I intended to make a career in that medium, I would need to specialise in appropriate subjects, the chief of these being English and Afrikaans. While welcoming the former, I dreaded the latter, particularly with the experience of school so fresh in my mind. It was suggested that, with the University on the far side of the mountain, I might go over to Rondebosch and stay with my grandmother , who had a spare room in her flat. It was a fair old hike from there to the campus but the exercise would do me good. l gave in my notice at the insurance company and, while there wasn't a person who didn't wish me well in my academic future, nobody seemed at all taken aback at my going, the surprise being that I'd lasted as long as I had. When Dr Rice, my maternal grandfather, decided to retire I was two years old. He sold both the house in Coventry and his practice and he and my grandmother agreed to separate, though they never divorced. A year after we had arrived in Cape Town, she decided to join us. She was sixty-four and becoming increasingly deaf. Unhappily, my father and she didn't get on. Whether or not he was jealous of the attention my mother gave her it's hard to say, but when she visited he communicate d by bellowing at her, calling her 'Mrs Rice' rather than a pet name, and never conversing for longer than he thought he could get away with without appearing rude. Consequently , she found it even harder to adjust to the new country and, having been discouraged from being too near us, moved several times in quick succession. The enforced separation from my mother must have been

Nigel Hawthorne

particularly wounding, and while it was true that they could be in touch by telephone, a visit to one another would take the best part of a day. Another bombshell came when Dr Rice stopped sending her money. However, in I93 5 her cousin Agnes Garrett died leaving her an annuity of £2.00 a year which, to the end of her days, gave her precarious financial independence. By the end of the decade she had exhibited, with great success, a collection of floral studies of wild flowers of the area which would lead to the commissioning of a book with a foreword by the prime minister, General Smuts. The origins of the book were in the world-renowned Kirstenbosch Gardens set on the eastern slopes of Table Mountain on land beqneathed to the nation by Cecil Rhodes on his death in I902. The small area of the south-western Cape is acknowledged by botanists to be one of the richest in the world, there being more than 2,500 species indigenous to the Cape Peninsula alone. Just after the First World War, an Englishman, Robert Compton, took over as director of the gardens and, slowly but surely, a representative collection of all the country's indigenous plants was established which meant simulating the arid conditions of the Karoo, where many of the succulents thrive, on a mountainside where rainfall, particularly during the winter months, was abundant. Professor Compton remained director of Kirstenbosch for thirty-five years. His meeting with my grandmother was the beginning of a partnership which was to occupy fifteen years of their lives. For each painting my grandmother received something in the region of £2. Today, this sounds a pittance, especially as I know to what lengths she went to ensure accuracy. On many occasions I was with her as she sat painting in silence, not daring even to remove either her hat or coat lest the flower in the glass of water in front of her should wilt. With her intimate knowledge of botany, which she had taught at Bedales as well as art, the detailed work she produced in water

colour would have satisfied even the most of exp